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Speed of Light Exceeded? - LHC Announcement

PunkJay

By PunkJay
in The Astro Lounge

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661-pete

661-pete

Posted
Posted

I notice that the story has slipped off the BBC News home page.... :glasses2:

Edit; that word filter again?? For goodness sake, do Americans have to rule every second of our lives? The word removed is, I suppose, considered racist against chinese people but is in the OED as a blemish in a smooth surface. I'm old enough to be allowed to find this annoying.
Indeed. :rolleyes:

I presume the phrase you were trying to type was the innocent - albeit cliché - "ch¡nk in the armour". I share your annoyance. It is time that a modicum of common sense were restored to what is in all other respects a very good forum.

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Ptarmigan

Ptarmigan

Posted
Posted
42
Hehee

wrt all the rest :

the only other facility that could maybe physically verify (or otherwise) this result is the tevatron at Fermi.

But that has run out of funding and is being closed down.

But (a) it has been putting out possible Higgs sightings and exclusions as tempters for extended funding

(:rolleyes: some experimenters now at LHC started their careers at Fermi and would like IT to continue,,

but I am not given to conspiracy theories am I :glasses2::D

Mindu, E=mc^2 and all that only forbids faster than light in vacuum, so what about DarkEnergy and other exotic mechanisms, particles and fields filling a supposed vacuum that these neutrinos may be seeing ?

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neil phillips

neil phillips

Posted
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If confirmed this will likely be the biggest discovery this century. And if confirmed, i hope all those that assume so many theorys and ideas about what is ,and what is not possible. Look at this possible discovery.

And stop making assumptions about space time Travel possibillites. How much can light be exceeded i wonder ? what effects on time and mass will it have ?

And above all accept its possible our understanding of physics could actually be so incomplete, That to argue theorys of impossibillities. Because of our complete knowledge of physics, is arrogant, naive, misguided. ( some might say deluded ) egotistical superiour nonsense.

And be mindfull, many many new discoverys could be waiting for us in the future, that could change everything we feel about intersteller travel.

Inter dimensional travel. And yes even time travel.

It sounds crazy i know. But then thats what someone would have been told on here last week if they had said i think matter can go faster than light.

Someone with the right stuff would likely have popped up to tell the person, sorry thats pretty unlikely or just plain absurd based on Einstiens theorys. I agree this finding could be wrong. But not my assesment of our arrogant nature as human beings. Thats what this finding might also be helping us see more clearly. Wow. Just imagine a million years into the future. Beam me up scotty

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Ptarmigan

Ptarmigan

Posted
Posted

Anyone got a link to what exactly the LHC peeps said ?

All I have is press reports, mostly BBC.

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

No, only (so far!) electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino and they oscillate between these states, no spontaneous switching.

And not very recent neiver, this oscillation was identified years ago as the explanation for the solar neutrino deficit in the solar neutrino flux, you know, long time ago when the likes of the beeb were reporting the death of the sun !

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yeti monster

yeti monster

Posted
Posted

And above all accept its possible our understanding of physics could actually be so incomplete, That to argue theorys of impossibillities. Because of our complete knowledge of physics, is arrogant, naive, misguided. ( some might say deluded ) egotistical superiour nonsense.

Which is what has always got my back up with yon 'professionals', they seem to believe that they are privvy to ultimate knowlage and that they are always right.

I can't wait for them to suddenly start preacing a different sermon as if it were what they have always been saying....

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sbooder

sbooder

Posted
Posted

It is funny how a lot of people here are slagging off the same scientists for being arrogant for thinking they know it all that are now publishing new conflicting data for peer review...mmm, the arrogance of these scientists, always checking the data and pushing the boundaries of our knowledge...when will they ever learn!

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earth titan

earth titan

Posted
Posted

I'm dumbfounded by some of the comments. Surely the whole point of science is to explain what we can't understand? The only philosophy which claims to understand everything is religion.

A scientists job is to disprove theories. If Einstein was wrong, so what? Just remember he didn't believe quantum theory, but without it, much of what we rely on today would not work.

Rant over. Sorry folks.

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michael.h.f.wilkinson

michael.h.f.wilkinson

Posted
Posted
I'm dumbfounded by some of the comments. Surely the whole point of science is to explain what we can't understand? The only philosophy which claims to understand everything is religion.

A scientists job is to disprove theories. If Einstein was wrong, so what? Just remember he didn't believe quantum theory, but without it, much of what we rely on today would not work.

Rant over. Sorry folks.

Agreed! As a professional scientist I would pack it all in if I really thought we knew everything, simply because there would be nothing to left to do. I do realize that some people can get upset by scientists claiming something is impossible. When a scientist says something is impossible, it can mean one of two things:

1) It is impossible IF our current understanding of physics is correct (and we know there are many gaps in our theories)

2) Whatever was proposed relies on a theory that was previously proven wrong (this includes both crackpot ideas and previously held theories that fell by the wayside (phlogiston, the ether)).

The former is a qualified "impossible", though in the case of violating the second law of thermodynamics the "impossible" becomes very strong indeed. The latter is a much stronger impossible, although there is a hidden qualification. Suppose your theory of time travel relies on the existence of the ether, in the exact formulation as shown to be wrong by Michelson and Morley. We could then say it is impossible because the ether in that form is inconsistent with experiment. This does not mean that time travel itself is impossible, just that the proposed means does not work.

Science can quite readily prove things wrong (which upsets people), but it cannot prove something right (which it is well aware of, see Popper). The exception is a mathematical proof of a theorem, which is correct only in very clearly conditions. Even there, Gödel's incompleteness theorem throws a bit of a spanner in the works.

I think these scientists are behaving in an exemplary fashion: they found a weird result, checked to see where they went wrong, failing that, ask others to check their results.

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studio1one

studio1one

Posted
Posted

Perhaps not as surprising as it initially appears, we have been trying to get our collective brains around quantum entanglement for some time. Sub atomic particles seem to share information instantly even at other ends of the universe. Perhaps we have just taken a step towards understanding quantum entanglement.

Furthermore it would get rid of a lot of very messy maths and equations involving multiple dimensions that we have invented to try and explain the big bang. Maybe it all just happened a lot faster than we thought.

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michael.h.f.wilkinson

michael.h.f.wilkinson

Posted
Posted
Perhaps not as surprising as it initially appears, we have been trying to get our collective brains around quantum entanglement for some time. Sub atomic particles seem to share information instantly even at other ends of the universe. Perhaps we have just taken a step towards understanding quantum entanglement.

Furthermore it would get rid of a lot of very messy maths and equations involving multiple dimensions that we have invented to try and explain the big bang. Maybe it all just happened a lot faster than we thought.

If this were an entanglement issue, the people at CERN would likely have spotted that. I am also not sure this would get rid of multiple dimensions (nothing messy about multiple dimensions per se, first-year linear algebra). I would first wait for independent confirmation.

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Macavity

Macavity

Posted
Posted

I still think "science" stands a few (at least six?) standard deviations above many of "commentators" to online articles on the subject. LOL. But sometimes I think it a shame that CERN - the "American Military" (whatever) put the internet on more general release... [mostly teasing] ;)

:glasses2:

I think it a "cruel cut" that amateur scientists often join in the epithet and ad-hominem hurling though. :rolleyes:

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RobSay

RobSay

Posted
Posted

I love the (bad) reporting on this. Einstein wouldn't necessarily be wrong - relativity would still work, it would just be modified to establish a boundary..

The actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 (PDF link top right)

Basically they got some results they didn't expect and that are not easily explained. They're now saying 'what have we missed?' and 'can anyone else see this?'. Way way short claiming discovery of new physics.

The last paragraph in the paper:

"Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results."

Some other views I like:

TheRegister: Faster-than-light back with surprising CERN discovery ? The Register

xkcd: xkcd: Neutrinos

R

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neil phillips

neil phillips

Posted
Posted

Im not suggesting the finding is correct. Just to be mindful that there will be other discoverys in the future that turn everything on its head, its happened before steady state theory, big bang ect, some want to go back to the steady state. suggestions of impossbillities based on theorys that appear correct from one century to the next, are arogant. People may not like that suggestion. But time will prove that observation correct, even if this is not the discovery to do it.

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