Neutrinos moving faster than light?

[Dave Dubya]

I thought this mildly amusing:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1110/1110.2832.pdf

[Macavity]

Ah, good old student (Bristol Uni?) humour... I had often wondered (now I know!):

Opened in 1927, the H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory was built as a tribute to H.O. Wills, head of the Wills tobacco empire, founder of the university and its first chancellor.

As competition for Richard Dawkins & A.C.Grayling, I was thinking about a "Smirnoff Institute for..."

[JulianO]

I don't follow the full details of the maths in the paper - well actually I don't follow hardly any of it, but it appears to be a real paper. I do like the abstract though!

[calibos]

I'm not sure if anyone has asked this already in the thread but I don't have time to read through it all now to check but.....

Can you imagine if some bright spark decided to connect up the output from the world wide network of Neutrino detectors to the SETI Super Computers/Seti @ home number crunching network only to find the reason why the universe is dark in terms of intelligent origin radio transmissions......Cause everyone in the Galaxy is talking realtime over the subspace neutrino network !!

[Karlos]

It is very possibly a slight error on such a ambitious experiment has occurred. But I would just LOVE if it was correct, it would really bring a spark to physics. I believe the team spent 6 months taking a thorough assessment of the results and experiment before publishing it to the scientific community and a similar experiment was carried out in the US in the past, which had the same indications, but they were completely dismissed.

[George Jones]

“According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer,”

Full story:

Faster than light neutrinos? More like faulty wiring.

[blackparticle]

[JulianO]

So far there is only one source for the story, so it might be prudent to wait for more official conformation before cancelling that holiday in the Triassic.

[JulianO]

Looks like they're going to check it out.

CERN Press Release

[titan79]

It's not really about light! It's about mass-less stuff. Nothing can have less than zero mass.

Well i am no expert so correct me if i am wrong but does anti-matter has less than zero what we call normal mass. As to say if an object had a mass of +1 the same object made from anti-matter would be -1 ........or am i talking rubbish ?

[themos]

No, I'm afraid that antimatter particles have the same mass as ordinary particles.

[titan79]

What makes them "anti" then i thought being the opposite of matter then their mass can not be + or at least not measured in the same way ? P.S i am a pure novice at this stuff and i accept i know nothing but i do think having my eyes opened to what is going on all around is a wonder in it's self !

[themos]

what makes them "anti" is the fact that when they meet their "normal" partner, they annihilate in a puff of pure energy. Some people think of them as normal particles going backwards in time.

[Stephen]

They are anti because the consist of positron (positive electrons if you like) orbiting antiprotons (negative protons.)

[titan79]

what makes them "anti" is the fact that when they meet their "normal" partner, they annihilate in a puff of pure energy. Some people think of them as normal particles going backwards in time.

Its funny that you say that because if they was going backwards in time maybe they already been through a life cycle of a universe and are heading for the big crunch, and the arrow of time runs in reverse when the universe stops expanding .

Also another novice question for you guys if the speed of light is absolute then from the moment of the big bang how fast did space expand ?

[themos]

maybe they already been through a life cycle of a universe

it's weirder than that, some people think that there is really only one particle and it just zooms forward and backward in time, between the beginning and the end, and what we see is just a plate of spaghetti composed of just one long strand. But nobody knows if it makes any sense to think like that.

The speed of light has nothing to do with the expansion of the universe, they both sound like they are speeds but only one actually is. the other is a percentage a year, like inflation in economics.

[titan79]

The speed of light has nothing to do with the expansion of the universe, they both sound like they are speeds but only one actually is. the other is a percentage a year, like inflation in economics.

But if its a percentage per year then isnt that a measure of distance over a period of time which in its self is what a measure of speed is, but i suppose the biggest question is what is it expanding into and is it reducing something else on the other side ?

[themos]

isnt that a measure of distance over a period of time

An inflation rate is not the same as a rate of pay.

[themos]

It is not expanding "into" anything. I don't like the term "expansion" for that exact reason, people think what is it expanding "into"? But if you think of it in terms of inflation, like in economics, that needless confusion does not arise.

[titan79]

I see your point , but if its not expanding but its getting bigger than the size it began at then what is the correct term . The only ones i can think of is growth, expanding or as you said inflation which all seem to mean the same thing its getting bigger . Which leads me to a different question , red shift and blue shift ? Just because its been proved that galaxies are moving towards and away from us what evidence is there that the universe as a whole is still growing as said galaxies are just moving inside a space and we cant see the edge ?

[themos]

what is the correct term

Scientists talk of a "scale factor", a quantity that expresses a kind of exchange rate between space and time and what we know is that the exchange rate has been changing as if space was "losing value".

[ollypenrice]

I see your point , but if its not expanding but its getting bigger than the size it began at then what is the correct term . The only ones i can think of is growth, expanding or as you said inflation which all seem to mean the same thing its getting bigger . Which leads me to a different question , red shift and blue shift ? Just because its been proved that galaxies are moving towards and away from us what evidence is there that the universe as a whole is still growing as said galaxies are just moving inside a space and we cant see the edge ?

This goes back to Hubble in the 1920s. He established a linear relationship between distance and galaxy recession velocity which held irrespective of the direction of observation. This means either that all galaxies are racing away from us, making us the centre of a kind of explosion (an absurd idea since our galaxy is like billions of others) or that there is a general expansion of space. His observation followed on from Einsteinn's general relativity and Einstein would probably have predicted it had contemporary astronomers not told him that there was no reason to think the universe unstable. When an astronomer came along with the evidence of galactic recession the fit with GR was excellent. One of the few who did not commit to the idea, ironically, was Hubble himself.

Olly

[themos]

making us the centre of a kind of explosion

The entire intellectual basis of astronomy is that "we are not special"

[OliverP]

Sorry to spoil your fun, but OPERA and the LHC have recently said (informally) that they think it was a GPS problem.

[ncjunk]

The entire intellectual basis of astronomy is that "we are not special"

But Human nature means people continually want to gravitate to the idea we are a special case and unique in the universe and it gets on my nerves.

When planets orbiting other stars or the possibility of life in other systems is mentioned on the news its always with a tone of amazement and wonder and a mention of how special we are...get over it..planets are common as muck and you can bet your..er..whatever...we'd need pest control wherever we went.

The everything moving away from us idea seems so similar to the notion that the Earth was the centre of the solar system. It's that little part of us that can't help but sometimes warm to ideas that indicate we are more important than we really are.

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