Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC

[Evil Eye]

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.



Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.



A report will soon be online to draw closer scrutiny to a result that, if true, would upend a century of physics.



In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.



We tried to find all possible explanations for this, said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.



We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't, he told BBC News.



When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'

Caught speeding?



The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.



Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.



But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.



Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.



The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.



In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.



The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.



But the group understands that what are known as systematic errors could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.



My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved, Dr Ereditato said.



But for now, he explained, we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy.



And of course the consequences can be very serious.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484





That's odd.

 

[Loucifer]

I was watching a piece on the news about this earlier today. If it turns out to be correct then that's the kind of thing that will change the world.

 

[Evil Eye]

change the world.

Hardly. Schools are still teaching Newtonian physics and the universe won't change. It'll also be a while till they come up with a new theory, after which I suppose universities will change the stuff they're teaching...

On the whole it's interesting, but not very world changing.

 

[Loucifer]

Apologies, but I disagree. I suppose it depends on how you look at it and how much time you spend thinking about it. Perhaps your average member of the general public will not give a damn, but it will change the way that scientists look at the world (and how they experiment and plan for experiments). Like it says, we've thought for years that the speed of light was the fastest that anything could travel, but now there's the very real possibility that that's not the case. It's mind boggling (well, it is to me anyway

).



If it is proved through further experimentation (and, I mean it's proved to the point where there can be no argument) then there will have to be some adjustment to the education system. It may not happen immediately, but providing it's proved beyond shadow of a doubt, it will happen.

 

[Evil Eye]

Well, it is interesting of course (although some things could already move faster than light: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#FTL_travel_of_non-information), but the chances of us (humans) travelling faster than light or still quite slim... survivability should be quite low.