Speed of Light 'Broken' by CERN Scientists

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www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8783011/Speed-of-light-broken-by-scientists.html



Speed of light 'broken' by scientists

It was Albert Einstein, no less, who proposed more than 100 years ago that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.

But last night it emerged that the man who laid the foundations for the laws of nature may have been wrong.


The science world was left in shock when workers at the world’s largest physics lab announced they had recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light


If the findings are proven to be accurate, they would overturn one of the pillars of the Standard Model of physics, which explains the way the universe and everything within it works.


Einstein’s theory of special relativity, proposed in 1905, states that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. But researchers at the CERN lab near Geneva claim they have recorded neutrinos, a type of tiny particle, travelling faster than the barrier of 186,282 miles (299,792 kilometers) per second.


The results have so astounded researchers that American and Japanese scientists have been asked to verify the results before they are confirmed as a discovery.


Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, said: “We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing.”

Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of physics.

John Ellis, a theoretical physicist, said Einstein’s theory underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics”.

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www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-particles-may-be-physics-revolution/?test=faces

'Faster Than Light' Particles Make Time Travel Possible, Scientist Says

Read more: www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-particles-may-be-physics-revolution/?test=faces#ixzz1Yt7Wzwk1

GENEVA – Leading scientists said on Friday the discovery of sub-atomic particles apparently traveling faster than light could force a major rethink of theories on the makeup of the cosmos if independently confirmed.

Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics at Britain's Manchester University, told Reuters the results if confirmed would mean it would be possible in theory to "send information into the past."

"In other words, time travel into the past would become possible...(though) that does not mean we'll be building time-machines anytime soon."


The CERN research institute near Geneva said measurements over three years had shown neutrinos pumped to a receiver in Gran Sasso, Italy, had arrived an average of 60 nanoseconds sooner than light would have done -- a tiny difference that could nonetheless undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is an extraordinary claim," eminent cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees told Reuters.

"It is premature to comment on this," Professor Stephen Hawking, the world's most well-known physicist, told Reuters. "Further experiments and clarifications are needed."

Professor Jenny Thomas, who works on neutrinos at CERN's friendly rival Fermilab near Chicago in the United States, commented: "The impact of this measurement, were it to be correct, would be huge."

CERN's own research director Sergio Bertolucci said if the findings were confirmed -- and at least two separate laboratories are likely to start work on this in the near future -- "it might change our view of physics."

The high level of caution is normal in science where anything that could be a breakthrough discovery, especially overturning well-established thinking, is in principle always checked and rechecked by other researchers.

In a comment issued by CERN, the world's leading laboratory for particle research on the edge of Geneva, Bertolucci underscored this principle.

"When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it is normal to invite broader scrutiny....it is good scientific practice," he said.

The measurements were posted on the scientific website arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
overnight.

The discovery would open up intriguing theoretical possibilities.

"Light speed is a cosmic speed limit and it exists in order to protect the law of cause and effect," said Professor Forshaw.

"If something travels faster than the cosmic speed limit, then it becomes possible to send information into the past - in other words, time travel into the past would become possible. That does not mean we'll be building time-machines anytime soon though - there is quite a gulf between a time-travelling neutrino to a time-travelling human."

GHOST PARTICLES

The CERN team, working in an experiment dubbed OPERA, pumped neutrinos -- often called ghost particles because they pass through matter, and human bodies, unnoticed -- from CERN 730 kms (500 miles) to Gran Sasso south of Rome.

Over three years, and from 15,000 neutrino "events," a huge detector at the Italian centre deep under mountain rock recorded what OPERA spokesman Antonio Ereditato described as the "startling" findings.

He said his team had high confidence they had measured correctly and excluded any possibility of some outside influence, or artefact, affecting the outcome.

"My dream is now that other colleagues find we are right," he added.

In Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which underpins the current view of how the universe works, nothing can travel faster than light -- 300,000 kms, or 186,000 miles, per second -- because its mass would become impossibly infinite.

Einstein's theory has been tested thousands of times over the past 106 years and only recently have there been just slight hints that the behaviour of some elementary particles of matter might not fit into it.

These hints were detected last year in Fermilab's MINOS experiment with neutrinos, but -- unlike those of OPERA -- were found to be within a normal margin of error.

Fermilab's Thomas, who is likely to be involved in MINOS experiments to check the CERN-Gran Sasso measurements, said if they were correct "it would overturn everything we thought we understood about relativity and the speed of light."

Ereditato, a physicist who also works at the Einstein Institute in the University of Berne, said the potential impact on science "is too large to draw any immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations."

SURPRISING WITH MYSTERIES

Also declining to claim a genuine scientific discovery before other researchers had confirmed them, he said the neutrino, whose existence was first confirmed in 1934, "is still surprising us with its mysteries."

Scientific bloggers on the Internet said the particle might be slipping into and out of dimensions, other than the known four of length, breadth, depth and time, as predicted by the controversial "string theory" of how the cosmos works.

"Only when the dust finally settles should we dare draw any firm conclusions," said Professor Forshaw. "It is in the nature of science that for every new and important discovery there will be hundreds of false alarms."


Read more: www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-particles-may-be-physics-revolution/?test=faces#ixzz1Yt71oTdm

[baydoll]

Wow if this is true then our entire concept of space/time will go flying/propelling out the window!

Holy moly!

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By Charles Krauthammer,

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.


The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.

I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.

Neutrinos fired 454 miles from a supercollider outside Geneva to an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy, took less time (60 nanoseconds less) than light to get there. Or so the physicists think. Or so they measured. Or so they have concluded after checking for every possible artifact and experimental error.

The implications of such a discovery are so mind-boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Something must have been wrong — some faulty measurement, some overlooked contaminant — to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.

And that’s the problem. It has to be impossible because, if not, if that did happen on this Orient Express hurtling between Switzerland and Italy, then everything we know about the universe is wrong.

The fundamental axiom of Einstein’s theory of relativity is the absolute prohibition on speed faster than light. Einstein’s predictions about how time slows and mass increases as one approaches the speed of light have been verified by a mountain of experimental evidence. As velocity increases, mass approaches infinity and time dilates, making it progressively and, ultimately, infinitely difficult to achieve light speed. Which is why nothing does. And nothing ever has.

Until two weeks ago Thursday.

That’s when the results were announced. To oversimplify grossly: If the Gran Sasso scientists had a plate to record the arrival of the neutrinos and a super-powerful telescope to peer (through the Alps!) directly into the lab in Geneva from which they were being fired, the Gran Sasso guys would have “heard” the neutrinos clanging against the plate before they observed the Geneva guys squeeze the trigger on the neutrino gun.

Sixty nanoseconds before, to be precise. Wrap your mind around that one.

It’s as if someone told you that yesterday at drive time Topeka was released from Earth’s gravity. These things don’t happen. Natural laws don’t just expire between shifts at McDonald’s.

Not that there aren’t already mysteries in physics. Neutrinos themselves are ghostly particles that travel through nearly everything unimpeded. (Thousands are traversing your body as you read this.) But that is simplicity itself compared to quantum mechanics, whose random arbitrariness so offended Einstein that he famously objected that God does not play dice with the universe.

Aphorisms don’t trump reality, however. They are but a frail, poignant protest against a universe that often disdains the most cherished human notions of order and elegance, truth and beauty.

But if quantum mechanics was a challenge to human sensibilities, this pesky Swiss-Italian neutrino is their undoing. It means that Einstein’s relativity — a theory of uncommon beauty upon which all of physics has been built for 100 years — is wrong. Not just inaccurate. Not just flawed. But deeply, fundamentally, indescribably wrong.

It means that the “standard model” of subatomic particles that stands at the center of all modern physics is wrong.

Nor does it stop there. This will not just overthrow physics. Astronomy and cosmology measure time and distance in the universe on the assumption of light speed as the cosmic limit. Their foundations will shake as well.

It cannot be. Yet, this is not a couple of guys in a garage peddling cold fusion. This is no crank wheeling a perpetual motion machine into the patent office. These are the best researchers in the world using the finest measuring instruments, having subjected their data to the highest levels of scrutiny, including six months of cross-checking by 160 scientists from 11 countries.

But there must be some error. Because otherwise everything changes. We shall need a new physics. A new cosmology. New understandings of past and future, of cause and effect. Then shortly and surely, new theologies.

Why? Because we can’t have neutrinos getting kicked out of taverns they have not yet entered.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gone-in-60-nanoseconds/2011/10/06/gIQAf1RERL_story.html

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“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D