subatomic particles travel faster than light @ cern

Scientists at the world's largest physics lab say they have clocked subatomic particles traveling faster than light, a feat that - if true - would break a fundamental pillar of science.

The readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPEED?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

WHAT

http://www.urbandigs.com/seller-nervous.jpg

you guys

YOU GUYS

this has actually made my heart rate go up.

kind of freaking out over here

where is caek

HOOS' heart, going faster than heartbeats! (FTH)

*pours one out for special relativity*

RIP

http://being.publicradio.org/programs/einsteinsethics/images/einstein-pressconference1950.jpg

DON'T TRY IT

particles propelled by einstein rolling in grave

word !

countdown to time machines

Nah, if this was going to mean time travel, the time travelers would already have shown up.

http://cdn.someecards.com/someecards/usercards/1288105095406_6175691.png

Society is in the gutter

this is what happens when you let liberals teach science

Nah, if this was going to mean time travel, the time travelers would already have shown up.

What if it's only that we can go forward in time?

Hey look, is Adam aging faster than the rest of us?

http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu216/le_bateau_ivre/g600616996.gif

Srsly, I like that when I will be 80, and people will ask me where I was when this occured, I can say I was on the lol-interent and a kind cool person called HOOS broke the news :)

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ll3g7599ht1qbwlyo.gif

this is maybe not appropriate but I want to post it everywhere

otm tho

Dan exactly why haven't they cast you as Doctor Who yet

I can say I was on the lol-interent and a kind cool person called HOOS broke the news :)

― 'Main Shop of Love' Gigolo (Le Bateau Ivre), Thursday, September 22, 2011 8:05 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"what's the internet"

"it was what we used before faceweb"

xp: IIRC you have to audition first

lol "faceweb"? we're on faceweb+ now!

I'm posting WITH MY MIND

(because my mind is telling my fingers which letters to type)

srsly my excitement about this this far exceeds my knowledge about the subject.

this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ-27rdwJPs

Supertomic particles

(because sub is below and their new distinctive feature is above, super?)

i'm from the future but it is p gauche to harp on about it imo

nbd

subatomic particles travel faster than light @ u face

must have been some date

lol

http://cdnimg.visualizeus.com/thumbs/6b/2e/2001,helmet,space,odyssey,stanley,kubrick-6b2ee01030065e6a3eee517c890da0f9_m.jpg

be serious everyone already knew that 'absolute speed' shit dont make no sense

boxedjoy otm

@ this news

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbislwKuzw1qef1kjo1_400.gif

if things really got more massive the faster they travel, why would ppl jog to lose weight? qed

shut down cern

w/e at u all freaking out over this, you never experienced it or understood it, its just something someone told you

http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu216/le_bateau_ivre/klzFO.gif

cool meme bro

just wanted to use that gif tbh

realizing einstein was a fraud is the "liberace was gay??" of the 21st century

Woops. No -- just [stuff "smart'' ppl talk about that u never learned abt in school tbh]

also, "dimentions"...

I just always supected this 'faster than light for subatomic particles' thing was possible, and it would allude to how much more we need to learn about quantam mecahnics.

otm imo

i was never clear why c was a hard limit in the first place.

Where is the Questionizer when we need him?

had a chat about this at work today. apparently even the guys who did it don't believe it.

also the italian science ministry put out a press release saying how proud they were of the tunnel between cern and the italian mine where the neutrons were detected. there is no tunnel. they go through solid rock.

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/something-is-deeply-wrong-minister-and.html

:D

abanana, somewhat related to your post, I remember reading about a theory that postulate that travelling back in time could be possible as long as it happened in a way that could not interfere with the present. I think is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle.

The shadow example is an interesting one. But aside from the fact that it couldn't be used to transmit anything, it's debatable to even consider a shadow a real physical entity.

yeah a shadow is not really a "thing"

interestin piece (for anyone of a philosophical bent) on why time travel is actually a nonsense concept

http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/onlineLibraryTPS.asp?DOI=10.1111/j.1467-9205.2011.01446.x&ArticleID=838743

skip to the end:

It will be objected that what I seem to be saying is that because the
grammar of our language does not accommodate time-travel then it
(time-travel) is not possible. It will be objected, in other words, that
I am illicitly inferring from the limits of our language to an alleged
limit to the possible nature of our world. But I might just as well –
just as rightly – have said this:“Because the grammar of our language
does not accommodate sdlfhjdsfg, then sdlfhjdsfg is not possible.”
Because, strange as it might sound, that is basically correct. Because
sdlfhjdsfg is nonsense; it has not yet been successfully assigned any
meaning; so “it” certainly is not possible. There is, we might usefully
say, no “it.” And the same is true of (what we seemingly wanted to
mean by) time-travel

I think that paper is time traveling in from the past.

0) What in sleep is missing from time-travel is the essential element of
any travel worthy of the name, of tourism and holidaying for instance:
the ability, at least, to go there and back again.The reason, I believe,
why the conclusion that going to sleep is as much travelling through
time as is going to the future in a time-machine is repugnant is that
we are only prepared to call going to the future “travelling through
time” if we can potentially return from the trip.

Oh really.

could it not just be that they are measuring the speed of light more accurately than previous experiments?

ok i know why the speed of light was determined empirically to be a constant -- michelson-morley basically*, and then some predicted experimental measurements which proved correct -- but can caek or others with the chops explain what it is exactly in the cosmos that requires this to be so structurally**?

*which i remember as being "some light was fired off of the top of a fast train and arrived no sooner than some other light fired an equal disance of a non-moving object: hence speed of train adds no velocity to light, as it would eg if you threw a pork pie from the same train"
**my dim memory of the non-euclidean geometry i did as a student converts this to "the speed of light is constant because the universe is THAT MUCH bent", but writing this out tells me some steps got skipped

those interested sending information back in time using faster-than-light particles should read:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/ba/Timescape%281stEd%29.jpg

Can I just interrupt this thread a moment to remind everyone about this, tomorrow: http://dvice.com/archives/2011/09/tevatron-closes.php R.I.P.

Thx, carry on.

**my dim memory of the non-euclidean geometry i did as a student converts this to "the speed of light is constant because the universe is THAT MUCH bent", but writing this out tells me some steps got skipped

are you asking why the speed of light is "c" or why the speed of light is always the same amount? those questions have separate answers. i think the "that much bent" explanation covers why the speed of light is why the speed it is.

the constancy has to do with electromagnetic fields, and making sure that moving through a field doesn't magically change the properties of the field in a way that looks illogical to a person standing still in that field, but i don't know how to break it down for you without pointing to the equations.

like a lot of quantum mechanics and general relativity, it is a lot easier to show how the result proceeds from manipulating the equations as opposed to showing how the result proceeds from logic and intuition.

i was just going over the monty hall problem with my students and we ended up at the same conclusion: we can show it using numbers and equations but we can't really *explain* it per se.

The explanation I got of the speed of light involved all of the simple equation etc., like v=d/t and f=ma and a few more recent ones, and it got to the point where it just had to be c. Also, at the speed of light, any further addition of energy to try to speed up anything would increase it's mass so much that it would offset any speed gain. But this was a long time ago, and I was never able to understand physics anyway. But I got the impression that it was fairly a priori rather than empirical.

it is, basically you just need to make sure that the equations that a person standing still would write for an electromagnetic wave match those that a second person - who is moving past that first person - will write for those waves. certain parts of the equations will be different, but certain parts need to agree. if you explore the consequences of that, you find that everybody sees the electromagnetic field moving at the same speed, whether they are standing still or not. that makes the speed invariant, and then manipulating the equations lets you solve for the value that it takes.

The way I've always thought of this is that the constancy of the speed of light is a POSTULATE of the theory of relativity. There is no reason why it should be constant. It just IS. From there you derive all the equations and if the equations describe the correct physics (which they do) then you can assume the postulate is correct.

P-NASTY, afaik the value of C has been determined with a precision much higher than the difference of the recently reported neutrino speed. So if (big if) this result is confirmed, it would prove neutrinos can travel faster than light, not that c is actually higher than the previously accepted value. What I don't know is whether the theory of relativity would still hold as long as we replace c_light with the speed of neutrinos.

'i was just going over the monty hall problem with my students and we ended up at the same conclusion: we can show it using numbers and equations but we can't really *explain* it per se.'

there are a lot of intuitive angles to approach the monty hall problem -- maybe there is one for c?

daavid i think the postulate is that the equations are complete and that moving and non-moving observers should agree on the equations, the speed of light actually follows from that, not the other way around.

i always found it hard to be intuitive about field equations, since i have never seen, heard, felt, sensed an actual magnetic field, let alone traveled through it at relativistic speed. i think cartoons and animations are probably the best way to approach this but i don't have any good ones to point out to you.

Well, I think you can see it both ways but in the way Einstein wrote it, the constancy of the speed of light is a postulate on its own. From Wikipedia:

The Principle of Relativity – The laws by which the states of physical systems undergo change are not affected, whether these changes of state be referred to the one or the other of two systems in uniform translatory motion relative to each other.

The Principle of Invariant Light Speed – "... light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity (speed) c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body." (from the preface). That is, light in vacuum propagates with the speed c (a fixed constant, independent of direction) in at least one system of inertial coordinates (the "stationary system"), regardless of the state of motion of the light source.

are the able to send the neutrinos off on their journey and then back again, thus having two neutrinos in the same place at the same time?

are the able to send the neutrinos off on their journey and then back again, thus having two neutrinos in the same place at the same time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk0Is8-gGSQ

"We don't serve faster-than-light neutrinos in this bar," said the bartender.

A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, September 23, 2011 9:23 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

big hoos, did you originate this?

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/10/charles-krauthammer-changing-our-world-faster-than-light/

i heard it at work first, but tbf now we don't have causality that doesn't prove anything

whoa

i mean i didn't see it anywhere first, but the framework of the joke is p low hanging fruit imo

O_O that it's verbatim though

neutrino who?
knock knock
neutrino
who's there?
neutrino neutrino neutrino
knock knock
neutrino

i watched nova last night and they said the universe is just a big slideshow, so theres that

http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/3/35/Obi_hologram.jpg

^ the universe

not a big fan of the universe prequels.

hoos otm

RUH ROH

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21188-more-data-shows-neutrinos-still-faster-than-light.html

Prof. Al-Khalili, who promised to eat his shorts if the FTL neutrino result was confirmed, still isn't convinced though:

http://twitter.com/#!/jimalkhalili/status/137446106429788161

I'm not believing it until they resolve the discrepancy with neutrino speeds measured astronomically.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_limv60r43l1qztotto1_400.jpg

Even a tiny discrepancy between the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso could be at the root of the faster-than-light results seen in September.

Wouldn't this be the first thing you'd check?

"wait when do the clocks go back in switzerland?"

IT'S A KIND OF TIME TRAVEL

Hope you all kept your time machine receipts...

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/breaking-news-error-undoes-faster.html

wtf, cern boffins working with one of the most expensive and important scientific investigations of our time, and they can't even check their fucking optical fibre connections!!?!?

my five year old could measure the speed of light more accurately

I was hoping there would be a flaw in their methodology that they would discover. Loose cable? how boring.

I did find this while looking into FTL ideas:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html

just breaking

LOLL

oh dear, another ghost in the machine.

cue Leno jokes abt programing VCR