iOWNme
22nd September 2011, 05:24 PM
Breaking: I think the unthinkable has possibly happened......
Experiment Breaks Speed of Light Barrier
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/429d211c-e561-11e0-852e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1YjKS3fhu - 1 Hour old
An experiment at Cern, the world’s largest physics laboratory, has shown particles apparently travelling faster than light – and in the process smashing what has been a fundamental tenet of science for more than a century.
On Thursday night Antonio Ereditato, leader of the Opera experiment at the lab in Switzerland, said beams of neutrinos, or subatomic particles, consistently arrived about 60 nanoseconds sooner on a 730km journey from Cern outside Geneva to the Gran Sasso underground lab in central Italy than if they would have been travelling at the speed of light – about 300,000km per second.
Although the neutrinos are only travelling 0.01 per cent faster than light, the result would shake the theoretical foundations of physics that have been built up since Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity. The speed of light is regarded as an absolute limit for fast travel, unless you invoke unproven factors such as extra dimensions, or “wormholes”, in space.
Another fundamental tenet of science is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, so no one is going to accept the Opera results until they have been verified independently by another experiment.
That verification could come in due course from the Minos experiment at Fermilab in the US, where neutrino beams also seemed to be travelling slightly faster than light in 2007. Neutrinos are ghostly particles that interact very little with ordinary matter.
Because the increase was within the experiment’s statistical margin of error, the Fermilab scientists did not make any claims at the time. But in the light of the Cern results they are going to re-examine their existing data and obtain more, said Jenny Thomas of University College London, a Minos researcher.
Independent scientists are likely to be extremely skeptical of the claim of neutrinos moving at “super-luminal” speed, because other evidence does not support it. In particular, the neutrinos reaching Earth from supernovae or exploding stars in other galaxies arrive at precisely the moment expected if they were traveling at the speed of light.
Even so, Mr Ereditato said the Opera team had reworked their data thoroughly to look for and exclude experimental artifacts. “We have high confidence in our results,” he said. “We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing. We now want colleagues to check them independently.”
But most theoretical physicists will resist trying to interpret the possibility of travel faster than light until the experimenters are more confident that it has actually happened.
Experiment Breaks Speed of Light Barrier
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/429d211c-e561-11e0-852e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1YjKS3fhu - 1 Hour old
An experiment at Cern, the world’s largest physics laboratory, has shown particles apparently travelling faster than light – and in the process smashing what has been a fundamental tenet of science for more than a century.
On Thursday night Antonio Ereditato, leader of the Opera experiment at the lab in Switzerland, said beams of neutrinos, or subatomic particles, consistently arrived about 60 nanoseconds sooner on a 730km journey from Cern outside Geneva to the Gran Sasso underground lab in central Italy than if they would have been travelling at the speed of light – about 300,000km per second.
Although the neutrinos are only travelling 0.01 per cent faster than light, the result would shake the theoretical foundations of physics that have been built up since Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity. The speed of light is regarded as an absolute limit for fast travel, unless you invoke unproven factors such as extra dimensions, or “wormholes”, in space.
Another fundamental tenet of science is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, so no one is going to accept the Opera results until they have been verified independently by another experiment.
That verification could come in due course from the Minos experiment at Fermilab in the US, where neutrino beams also seemed to be travelling slightly faster than light in 2007. Neutrinos are ghostly particles that interact very little with ordinary matter.
Because the increase was within the experiment’s statistical margin of error, the Fermilab scientists did not make any claims at the time. But in the light of the Cern results they are going to re-examine their existing data and obtain more, said Jenny Thomas of University College London, a Minos researcher.
Independent scientists are likely to be extremely skeptical of the claim of neutrinos moving at “super-luminal” speed, because other evidence does not support it. In particular, the neutrinos reaching Earth from supernovae or exploding stars in other galaxies arrive at precisely the moment expected if they were traveling at the speed of light.
Even so, Mr Ereditato said the Opera team had reworked their data thoroughly to look for and exclude experimental artifacts. “We have high confidence in our results,” he said. “We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing. We now want colleagues to check them independently.”
But most theoretical physicists will resist trying to interpret the possibility of travel faster than light until the experimenters are more confident that it has actually happened.