Bye bye relativity? Scientists apparently break speed of light.

[crypto-fascist superhero]

Cool!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8782895/CERN-scientists-break-the-speed-of-light.html

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

hmmm...Maybe Naso will be able to live in the 80's....

[Senator Snowstalker]

hmmm...Maybe Naso will be able to live in the 80's....

I now officially consider you a FF.

[The Mikado]

Speed of light in a medium /= speed of light in vacuum.

[IDS Judicial Overlord John Dibble]

What? The word of Einstein must never be questioned. Ever. These heretics must be excommunicated from Science.

But seriously, should these results be replicated this is f**king awesome. This is potential Nobel Prize material.

Speed of light in a medium /= speed of light in vacuum.

Ok... and do you think the highly trained physicists working at CERN don't know that? The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second. The speed of these neutrinos is supposedly 299,798,454 meters per second. (link to another article w/ that number)

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

I'll bet on Albert...CERN dudes probably arent taking something into account

[IDS Judicial Overlord John Dibble]

I'll bet on Albert...CERN dudes probably arent taking something into account

The thought has occurred to my inner amateur physicist that somehow their experiment may be somehow be warping spacetime somewhat like a warp drive, allowing the neutrinos to fall into the warped spacetime and only appear to arrive at their destination faster than light. Though that's entirely speculation and I wouldn't have any clue whether or not it's plausible since I know only what the news articles have said about the experiment.

[ilikeverin]

What? The word of Einstein must never be questioned. Ever. These heretics must be excommunicated from Science.

But seriously, should these results be replicated this is f**king awesome. This is potential Nobel Prize material.

Oh, if these results are replicated, this is definite Nobel Prize material.  But I laud the researchers in question for reiterating in every interview that I've seen that this is only preliminary and really really really needs to be replicated and all the other possible sources of error dealt with before we start coping with the consequences.

[bullmoose88]

I said I wish I could go back to the beginning of the season, put some money on the Cubbies!
 

[IDS Judicial Overlord John Dibble]

Found another article that suggests that an alternative is that the neutrinos were possibly traveling through higher dimensions of space, which if true apparently is a victory for string theory and would still be Nobel Prize material.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0922/Particle-traveling-faster-than-light-Two-ways-it-could-rewrite-physics

[muon2]

The curious part of the OPERA observation is that MINOS at Fermilab should have the data to confirm or refute the claim. I'm waiting to see the official paper to see why one might see it but not the other.

[ilikeverin]

The curious part of the OPERA observation is that MINOS at Fermilab should have the data to confirm or refute the claim. I'm waiting to see the official paper to see why one might see it but not the other.

I was hoping you'd chime in

[Politico]

I said I wish I could go back to the beginning of the season, put some money on the Cubbies!
 

Post of the week.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

The curious part of the OPERA observation is that MINOS at Fermilab should have the data to confirm or refute the claim. I'm waiting to see the official paper to see why one might see it but not the other.

makes sense...I was thinking, "Certainly these guys arent the first to measure the speed of neutrinos, are they?!"

at least they are being skeptical of their results and asking for their peers to check their data...otherwise this could end up being another cold fusion fiasco

[bullmoose88]

...otherwise this could end up being another cold fusion fiasco

Nothing would top this (I do have a thing for Shue...sue me)

[True Federalist]

Neutrinos are weird in other ways, and still not very well understood.  I'm no physicist, but one possible way out of this might be that for neutrinos, their mass values might not be represented by a real scalar, which surely would have all sorts of screwy effects.

[muon2]

The curious part of the OPERA observation is that MINOS at Fermilab should have the data to confirm or refute the claim. I'm waiting to see the official paper to see why one might see it but not the other.

makes sense...I was thinking, "Certainly these guys arent the first to measure the speed of neutrinos, are they?!"

at least they are being skeptical of their results and asking for their peers to check their data...otherwise this could end up being another cold fusion fiasco

We may have to be patient. MINOS has a measurement from 2007, but lacks the necessary accuracy. They are upgrading to increase precision, but corroborating results won't be available until next year.

[Sibboleth]

What might have been the biggest physics story of the past century may instead be down to a faulty connection.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17139635

[True Federalist]

Dangit!  Some error in the experiment was always the most likely reason, but we could hope.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

Dangit!  Some error in the experiment was always the most likely reason, but we could hope.

hope for what, How the World Works by Scientists Who Demand to be Worshipped, Version: 49917912372?

[IDS Judicial Overlord John Dibble]

Dangit!  Some error in the experiment was always the most likely reason, but we could hope.

hope for what, How the World Works by Scientists Who Demand to be Worshipped, Version: 49917912372?

Hope for learning something new and interesting about the universe that defies our prior knowledge.

And I don't think anyone is demanding to be worshiped here - the scientists followed proper procedure. They tried to figure out what might have given them results that were outside of expectations, published their results when they were reasonably sure they weren't due to problems while expressing caution to not leap on it as fact, and asked other scientists to try to replicate their results. That they may have not caught onto all possible problems with their experiment is totally understandable - they are human, and the machinery they are working with is likely more complicated than the machines we use to send people into space. (which have had disastrous problems on more than one occasion) It's entirely because they know the possibility they were wrong in some way that they asked others to check their work.

[True Federalist]

Dangit!  Some error in the experiment was always the most likely reason, but we could hope.

hope for what, How the World Works by Scientists Who Demand to be Worshipped, Version: 49917912372?

Science is always more interesting when we discover that that our view of how the world works is shown by more precise data to be insufficient, for it opens up new fields of inquiry.  Take for example Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's relativity.  At the energies and speeds that could be measured in Newton's day, the two are indistinguishable.  It wasn't until we began to be able to study high-energy physics that we were able to realize that Newtonian mechanics was insufficient. Until that was the case, there was no reason for us to even consider alternatives to a theory that fit all the known facts.

If Einstein had been born a century earlier, he would never have come up with relativity.  It was an area of inquiry he would never had a reason to investigate.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

1) I'm a big fan of experimental physics

2) I thought Einstein figured out that Newton was wrong by use only thought experiements

[True Federalist]

1) I'm a big fan of experimental physics

2) I thought Einstein figured out that Newton was wrong by use only thought experiments

Einstein used thought experiments to come up with solutions to the discrepancies between how Newton explained the universe and what experimental results that were being done by others were showing once we started investigating atomic and subatomic particles.  Without those discrepancies, he would have had no reason to come up with relativity, not for his work on the photoelectric effect that he won his Nobel Prize for.