CERN Confirms Neutrinos Not Faster Than Light

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112551696/cern-confirms-neutrinos-not-faster-than-light/

by sparknlaunch • 14 years ago

37 26 14 years ago

acex2• 14 years ago

were likely goes both ways.

simcop2387• 14 years ago

While it's awesome that the experiment has been corrected and is now working properly, it is a little disappointing to me that the answer isn't so strange.

I would have loved it if it turned out to be something real just because it would have made some form of communication between planets without a delay possible.

patdennis3• 14 years ago

Eh, this was never about instantaneous travel, this was about a slight increase in speed.

Instantaneous communication causes some serious problems with time/causality anyway.

That said, there's always Tachyons. [0] and I think the information transfer that happens during quantum teleportation is faster than light [1]

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

mattheww• 14 years ago

FYI, quantum teleportation does not transmit information faster than light. You'll notice from the explanation in your link that some information still needs to be transmitted through a classical channel (ie at light speed).

planetguy2• 14 years ago

Eh, this was never about instantaneous travel, this was about a slight increase in speed.

The thing you need to understand about relativity is that travelling even slightly faster than the speed of light in any frame of reference is instantaneous communication, in some other frame of reference.

If I send a signal from point A and it arrives at point B just infinitesimally faster than the speed of light, then according to an observer in some other reference frame the transmission from A and arrival at B happened simultaneously, and according to some other observer the arrival actually happened before the transmission.

It's also important to note that once you have any FTL travel you automatically have time travel (or at least, backwards-in-time communication). But I'd have to draw a diagram to explain why.

zerostar074• 14 years ago

But It would also violate causality And render the reply button below irrelevant:

excuse-me• 14 years ago

Not necessarily, if you pick your reference frame, v>c doesn't necessary violate causality

http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/faster_light_neutrinos_d...

fusiongyro5• 14 years ago

It never made sense to me why they publicized the result, since it looked so clearly like some kind of experimental screw up. All it could do is make them look like amateurs when it inevitably came out that they bungled something.

okamiueru• 14 years ago

I think they were aware of how it looked, as well as the most likely explanation. However, if you have results you cannot explain, you show it to your peers so they can find the error, or confirm the discovery. They never went public and said "we made a discovery". They went public and said "this is what we did, this is what we got".

zerostar074• 14 years ago

So in the age of twitter, you scorn a bunch of good physicists for making public their hard earned (but ultimately wrong) and novel experimental data?

keypusher• 14 years ago

In other news: sky is blue, grass is green.

acex2• 14 years ago

end of the article "After months of investigation, physicists have ruled that the speedy neutrinos observed were likely due to a faulty connection in an optical fiber of the Master Clock." i really do wonder why negative attitude to my "were likely goes both ways" - they have ruled (not proved) that something is likely. please. either the article is stupid or those who have ruled.

weichi• 14 years ago

A very good post on this by Matt Strassler from earlier this year:

http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-phy...

There were apparently two problems:

1. An improperly calibrated clock 2. A fiber optic cable was not fully plugged in. This led to a little bit of light leaking out from the cable, which lead to a (very small) delay in recognition of the arrival of a pulse on the fiber.

Yes, modern physics experiments are pretty complicated and lots of things can go wrong!

CERN Confirms Neutrinos Not Faster Than Light

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