New paper claims that the neutrino is likely a faster-than-light particle

http://phys.org/news/2014-12-faster-than-light-particles.html

by kowdermeister • 12 years ago

59 47 12 years ago

codezero2• 12 years ago

I am always weary of a sole authored physics paper, especially in particle physics. Either he had nobody working with him, or nobody wanted their name associated with the work, both raise red flags these days.

Direct link to arxiv paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804

kefka• 12 years ago

Instead of attacking the person who wrote a hypothesis about neutrino speed, do you know who will be duplicating his experiment?

Bud• 12 years ago

I didn't see the comment as a personal attack. It was merely pointed out that the commenter finds papers with a sole author to be questionable.

As for "his experiment", if you actually read the article, you can see that there apparently was no experiment; rather, the paper's conjecture relies on analysis of data from other observations and experiments. So the answer is that nobody will be duplicating the experiment in question, since it does not exist.

codezero2• 12 years ago

He used other derived data, and didn't himself perform any experiment which can be duplicated. We'll hopefully get a better understanding of neutrino mass from KATRIN [1], which will likely lead to additional insights into their speed.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KATRIN

_almosnow• 12 years ago

Science != PR

SeanLuke• 12 years ago

The result relies on tachyons having an imaginary mass, or a negative mass squared.

Perhaps these two were mixed up?

mp8• 12 years ago

I suspect it's meant to be negative (mass squared) rather than (negative mass) squared.

tjradcliffe4• 12 years ago

Correct. Tachyons appear in dynamical equations with imaginary masses, which, when squared, give negative "squared masses".

lkrubner• 12 years ago

If true, this would explain the Fermi Paradox. If there is a faster-than-light particle in this universe, then that is what intelligent life would use to communicate. We can assume that aliens that are smart enough to reach the level that they figure out what a neutrino is, would also, eventually, figure out a way to use it to communicate.

Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I mean that no intelligent life form will communicate with the standard parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which at best travels at the speed of light, if there is a faster alternative. IF there is a particle that travels faster than light, then it seems likely intelligent life will find a way to send that particle in bursts, allowing at least as much communication as is allowed by Morse Code. The point is, the universe is very big, and the speed of light is very slow if you are trying to converse with someone on the other side of your galaxy, or in another galaxy. So if there is a particle that does move faster than the speed of light, it is likely that intelligent life would attempt to use it for communication. This would explain why the SETI project has not picked up anything yet -- they are listening for the wrong thing.

temuze• 12 years ago

Interesting. I had to look up what the Fermi paradox is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

But this doesn't solve why the Earth wasn't already visited/colonized, correct?

pizzashark• 12 years ago

The nearest life-bearing planet is most likely hundreds of light-years away. Faster-than-light communication doesn't mean faster-than-light travel, and nobody wants to sit in a spaceship for 200 years.

Retra• 12 years ago

We can assume that aliens that are smart enough to reach the level that they figure out what a neutrino is, would also, eventually, figure out a way to use it to communicate.

You can't just assume that understanding a law allows you to violate it. Understanding leads to some advantage, but it may well just be a diversion of resources away from trying the impossible. If it is inherently contradictory that FTL neutrinos can be used for communication, then what you are suggesting is obviously wrong. And seeing as how you don't know that, you'd be foolish to assume it.

Dylan16807• 12 years ago

It possibly gives an excuse for the lack of transmissions visible, but simple efficiency considerations already explain that. You transmit with the minimum power that works (plus margin), with as much focus as you can get.

tjradcliffe4• 12 years ago

Stanislaw Lem used the idea of neutrinos-for-communication as the cause of the "silent universe" in His Master's Voice, which is possibly the best fictional account of how science actually works that I have ever read. Highly recommended.

CamperBob22• 12 years ago

If there is a faster-than-light particle in this universe, then that is what intelligent life would use to communicate.

SETI-like efforts have a big handicap for a different reason. To oversimplify a bit: any signal that is distinguishable from noise is a waste of energy.

Right now, in the name of spectral efficiency, we're migrating our legacy systems (such as TV broadcast) to modulation formats that sound exactly like white noise to a receiver that doesn't know the coding scheme... and never mind encryption, which has the same effect. Other races will be confronted with the same problems, and will use the same solutions, to the extent they use wireless for medium- to long-range communications at all.

So, the only way we'll detect intelligible signals from an alien world is if we happen to catch them between their development of communications technology and information theory. This is a pretty narrow window -- only about 100 years in our case.

If SETI has any hope at all, it will lie in detecting deliberate beacon transmissions, not incidental RF. But some smart people have argued that attracting attention with such a beacon would be a mistake, possibly the last one the species in question ever makes.

pmoriarty2• 12 years ago

"Other races will be confronted with the same problems, and will use the same solutions, to the extent they use wireless for medium- to long-range communications at all."

This seems a little ahistorical and antropocentric to me.

Ahistorical because even humans have avoided using certain technologies for a variety of reasons -- from certain weapons (chemical/biological, cluster bombs, nuclear weapons, etc) to pesticides, communications technologies, certain programming languages, etc. despite their arguable technological superiority or ability to get the job done.

Anthropocentric because, really, who knows how aliens would think or what they would do? Your argument applies, if it applies at all, to species that think and act much like us. It is debatable whether radically different intelligent (a term which we don't understand even when we apply it to ourselves) species would even understand something as "fundamental" as mathematics the way we do, nevermind actually use technical artifacts in a way recognizable to us.

On the subject of recognizability, could bacteria recognize the humans that they dwell on as intelligent or even living? Can they recognize anything at all? As bacteria are to us, so we may be to alien intelligent life, or even to potentially intelligent life here on earth such as trees, superorganisms like insect or fungal colonies, etc. Organisms that operate at radically different time scales or radically different ways of relating to the world.

Some have argued that the Earth is an organism with agency, or the Internet is one. If that is so, how would we recognize these as such, how would we communicate with them, if it is possible? And if communicating with these on Earth is so unlikely, how much less the likelihood of communicating with beings from other star systems or galaxies utterly unlike that of our own?

millstone• 12 years ago

Tachyons cannot be used to communicate FTL even though they have v > c. See http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/tac... for a cool explanation.

Regardless, neutrinos would seem to be a viable communication medium. SETI is considering how they may be used: http://www.seti-setr.org/SETI/neutrinos.html

pmoriarty2• 12 years ago

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." -- Arthur C Clarke

NoLAN36• 12 years ago

Funny thing is there has already been some success towards using neutrinos to communicate here on earth (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrin...). While it's nowhere near efficient currently; I won't dare imagine what could be achieved given a few more years of research.

gatorek• 12 years ago

This is an old hypothesis: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810355

dalke• 12 years ago

Which is likely why the linked-to article says "three theorists Chodos, Hauser, and Kostelecky suggested in 1985 that they might be hiding in plain sight – specifically that neutrinos are tachyons".

qwerta• 12 years ago

Neutrino is faster than light in the water. To decide about vacuum we have to wait for another nearby supernova.

m0skit0• 12 years ago

Neutrino being faster than light when both in the water doesn't mean anything regarding c as a barrier.

dnautics• 12 years ago

it's a well accepted fact that neutrino bursts precede EM effects in supernovae.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

Besides tachions, it's very interesting to hear somebody talk about the exact mass of a neutrino.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

OK, how does this avoid breaking causality?

rosser• 12 years ago

If neutrinos are, in fact, tachyons, our notions of causality were already broken.

Steuard2• 12 years ago

This article on phys.org appears to be taken verbatim from a press release written by the paper's author, Robert Erlech. (Here's his website: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rehrlich/) From that site, here's a link to what seems to be the original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804

Just as a minor quality signifier, it looks like this paper is categorized under gen-ph ("General Physics") on arXiv.org. That's unusual for mainstream research: topics like this would usually be categorized as "High energy physics" or "Astrophysics". I don't know exactly what criteria arXiv.org uses to judge when a paper should be moved to the "general" category, but I've had the sense that re-categorization is used as a (weak) form of quality control.

I haven't read the paper yet, but this is a truly extraordinary claim. It would take extraordinary evidence (or at least a hint of such evidence) for me to take it seriously.

tjradcliffe4• 12 years ago

I originally thought the SN1987A results--which show the neutrino burst from a supernova in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud arriving at the same time as the light, within error-would easily falsify this but forgot that high energy tachyons approach c from above as their energy goes up, so for the 5+ MeV neutrinos that were detected the velocity difference would be negligibly different from c regardless if the mass is positive of negative.

It's a curious result, but I'd still lean toward consistent defects in the data over a tachyonic neutrino, personally.

omilu• 12 years ago

From what I remember of physics, objects get infinitely massive as they approach the speed of light and therefore require infinite energy to get to the speed of light. Is this not correct anymore?

CurtMonash• 12 years ago

That's an argument for why objects can't be accelerated to and beyond c. But there's a loophole for objects that are already traveling faster than c when they're first created.

New paper claims that the neutrino is likely a faster-than-light particle

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