I read about this earlier. They're getting US and Japanese labs to try and replicate the experiment.
Needless to say, it'll be freaking awesome if this is true.
Particles move faster than light?
Summary
Scientists at Cern have reported the apparent discovery of particles traveling faster than the speed of light.
Topics
17 mile tunnel where physicists shoot particles Credit: Cern
In a paper published on Thursday, Scientists at Cern and across Europe have reported the apparent discovery of particles traveling faster than the speed of light. The researchers described their experiment, which seems to show that a beam of neutrinos traveling through the Earth arrived at a detector some 60 nanoseconds faster than light would take to travel the same distance.
If confirmed, this would require a fundamental rethink of Einstein's theory, which has underpinned both classical and quantum physics for a century. However, the researchers emphasize that they are not making this claim, rather that they are calling for critical analysis of their experiment and independent replication of the results.
For the experiment, neutrinos travel 730 kilometers through the Earth to a 1,300-ton particle detector called the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (Opera). According to standard physics, the journey should take 2.43 milliseconds. On average, the experiment found, they arrived around 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected, with an uncertainty in the measurement of around 10 nanoseconds. The result, given the number of detected neutrinos and the declared accuracy, is good enough to qualify as a statistically validated discovery.
For more on this story, read Researchers catch 'faster-than-light' particles on ZDNet UK.
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They'll need to explain why the neutrinos from supernova 1987A arrived at the same time as the light. If their experiment were true, they should have arrived years earlier.
@pdskep Hence the last line of the UK article. Energy levels can affect a lot.
@Aerowind :From Wiki
"Even though supernova observations indicate that neutrinos propagate at the speed of light, it is not clear whether this result holds at higher energies. In particular, in the context of the Standard-Model Extension,[27][28][29] a realistic effective theory that includes Lorentz invariance violations, neutrinos experience Lorentz-violating oscillations and can travel faster than light at high energies."
So it still wouldn't violate the Standard Model. So are the neutrinos produced at Cern higher energy than those produced in a supernova?
"Even though supernova observations indicate that neutrinos propagate at the speed of light, it is not clear whether this result holds at higher energies. In particular, in the context of the Standard-Model Extension,[27][28][29] a realistic effective theory that includes Lorentz invariance violations, neutrinos experience Lorentz-violating oscillations and can travel faster than light at high energies."
So it still wouldn't violate the Standard Model. So are the neutrinos produced at Cern higher energy than those produced in a supernova?
They have to consider the possibility that somehow space shrunk or a shortcut through space was found (like a wormhole), and that's how the particles arrived earlier. Because Einstein's theories do allow for the fabric of space to expand or contract and does allow for wormholes.
60 nanoseconds - so that's about 60 feet for light speed. How accurately do they know the distance between the transmitter and detector? Was this a GPS-derived calculation?
Is the 10 nanosecond precision based on time measurement or distance measurement?
Is the 10 nanosecond precision based on time measurement or distance measurement?
Also I see a need to repeat this experiment using independent equipment and different distances. That to me would be the only way to confirm positively that this is not a calibration error.
@Michael Kelly They've already asked the US and Japan to do that very thing.
Because it's been duplicated in the lab, scientist take for granted the theory of "Quantum entanglement", an effect that is equally strange as "faster than light" speed effects.
It wouldn't shock me to learn that at certain energy levels, neutrinos could travel faster than light. After all, a well known theory involving "inflation" of the known universe micro seconds after the Big Bang occurred postulates faster than light speed effects. (Yeah, I never really bought into "Inflation" but perhaps this discovery of "faster than light speed" neutrinos, if true, could explain that effect.)
It wouldn't shock me to learn that at certain energy levels, neutrinos could travel faster than light. After all, a well known theory involving "inflation" of the known universe micro seconds after the Big Bang occurred postulates faster than light speed effects. (Yeah, I never really bought into "Inflation" but perhaps this discovery of "faster than light speed" neutrinos, if true, could explain that effect.)
@kenosha7777
Also keep in mind that the speed of light limit does not pertain to the expansion of space. Even now, if you take two points in space sufficiently far enough away, they appear to move away from each other at speeds greater than the speed of light because of the expansion of space.
Also keep in mind that the speed of light limit does not pertain to the expansion of space. Even now, if you take two points in space sufficiently far enough away, they appear to move away from each other at speeds greater than the speed of light because of the expansion of space.
I don't beleive relativaty prohibits faster than light travel. It says you'd need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a mass to the speed of light. There's no rules against if something starts off faster than that. See: tachyon. These particles would require infinite energy to slow them *below* the speed of light. Physics is awesome 
@db8120
Wouldn't infinite energy mean infinite mass as well, given that the neutrino is not massless? And in that case wouldn't we all be space goo by now having been swallowed up by the gravitational pull of the infinitely-massive faster-than-light neutrinos?
Maybe some quantum mechanics wierdness at play here? Quantum and relativity have never been best friends anyways.
btw, The tachyon has never been observed and is hypothetical afaik.
Wouldn't infinite energy mean infinite mass as well, given that the neutrino is not massless? And in that case wouldn't we all be space goo by now having been swallowed up by the gravitational pull of the infinitely-massive faster-than-light neutrinos?
Maybe some quantum mechanics wierdness at play here? Quantum and relativity have never been best friends anyways.
btw, The tachyon has never been observed and is hypothetical afaik.
@kenosha7777
"Inflation" and the expansion of the universe (Hubble limit etc) do not refer to travel through space, but the expansion of space itself, and is consistent with Relativity.
"Inflation" and the expansion of the universe (Hubble limit etc) do not refer to travel through space, but the expansion of space itself, and is consistent with Relativity.
for the calculation of 2.43ms expected duration, wonder if scientits accounted for the space time warp insider earth due to earth's own gravitational field and how accurate is our knowledge of this field.
Dimitris Papantoniou
Dimitris Papantoniou
It's an anomaly and that's how we discover new things.
It might be interesting to run this experiment with a moon based target. The greater distance might be more easily measured/calibrated, given the same energy level applied in the experiment described here. A direct comparison with the time for light to reach the same target could provide valuable data. Some variations may be found that might be attributable to neutrinos passing through Earth's gravity and magnetic fields. Sound waves propagate more rapidly through water than air, and more rapidly through "solid" mass compared to water. Could there be a parallel here?
Could the earth's own movemment account for the discrepancy? While the locations of the start timer detector and the end timer detector might be a constant distance, if the end timer detector moves between the time the start timer is triggered and the end timer is triggered then the relative distance between the two will have changed, hence a difference in the expected time of arrival of the particles.
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