News Speed of light broken?

[Face]

I have the "gut feeling" this thread is veering off-topic.

Back on topic, I wonder what implications such a result would have on today's theories, if proven true. Some of the comments - posted on the links orb gave - talk about just replacing c with whatever velocity is measured for the neutrinos. I doubt it'll be that easy...

 

[jedidia]

I have the "gut feeling" this thread is veering off-topic.

Back on topic, I wonder what implications such a result would have on today's theories, if proven true. Some of the comments - posted on the links orb gave - talk about just replacing c with whatever velocity is measured for the neutrinos. I doubt it'll be that easy...

It's pretty hard to anticipate... The bulk of relativity should survive, as it showed itself to work quite well, with the only known potential exceptions being these pesky neutrinos.

I'd say in a 'worst case' (for einstein) relativity would be reduced to a more narrow area in which it is valid (like newton). I a 'best case' scenario the whole affair might lead to a developemet finally redeeming the differences between relativity and quantum mechanics, finally leading a step closer to that holy grail pf a 'big unifying theory'.

 

[fort]

...these pesky neutrinos.

:leaving:

 

[Moach]

back to topic now.... :shifty:

I'm definitely skeptical about this FTL Neutrino, but, like the guy on Sixty Symbols, doesn't mean I wont try to think of some solution.

[Idea]
Gravity causes a distortion in space-time that all matter is bound to, but since the Neutrino is a WIMP, could it be possible for it to not be affected by this distortion.

Its like if a Photon could be described as a car, driving from point a to point b, with depressions in the terrain (gravity), which would increase the travel distance. the Neutrino is a plane, though can only fly as fast as the car over level terrain, is unaffected by the valleys, and flies a shorter distance as a result. making it arrive slightly earlier.
[/Idea]

the speed of light and the speed of the neutrinos would be the same in level space-time, but as the two particle streams approach a gravity well, they would begin to diverge.

I would like to hear your opinions (like if there's a major flaw in the logic or not, and a description for why)

i caught myself wondering about the same thing earlier this morning....

couldn't the whole thing be due to some relativistic "prank" of nature? - if the neutrinos don't interact with gravity, then could it be that they're not really travelling FTL - but rather that they are not getting "slowed down" by time dilation from earths gravity well in the same sense as we are?

then it's not the neutrinos that are FTL - it's the clocks that are ticking "too slow" for them :shifty:


any thoughts?

 

[agentgonzo]

I read something on UniverseToday about a month ago that the error may be due to the relativistic motion of the GPS satellites (and the clocks and times derived therefrom). I haven't heard this much in the main articles about this but also haven't heard a debunking of it. Can anyone on here shed some light on this?

 

[Moach]

didn't they double-check that already? - i read somewhere a handful of pages pack that this was one of the first things they thought would be causing it....

not sure how that turned out, tho... some more info would indeed be appreciated :hmm:

 

[Fizyk]

couldn't the whole thing be due to some relativistic "prank" of nature? - if the neutrinos don't interact with gravity, then could it be that they're not really travelling FTL - but rather that they are not getting "slowed down" by time dilation from earths gravity well in the same sense as we are?

Doesn't make much sense to me. You see, there isn't really a possibility of something not interacting with gravity, unless there is some other space (or spacetime) in which it would exist. Since gravity is the distortion of spacetime (or, more precisely, it's the effects caused by this distortion), everything existing in this spacetime is automatically affected by it.

I read something on UniverseToday about a month ago that the error may be due to the relativistic motion of the GPS satellites (and the clocks and times derived therefrom).

AFAIK, the GPS satellites are only used for synchronization of the ground clocks, so the motion of the satellites shouldn't have any effect on the measured time, but I may be wrong here.

 

[agentgonzo]

AFAIK, the GPS satellites are only used for synchronization of the ground clocks, so the motion of the satellites shouldn't have any effect on the measured time, but I may be wrong here.

As I understood it, this was the GPS satellites were used for. But if you don't take into relativistic motion of the satellites, then your ground clocks won't be in sync, so your measured time will contain errors.

 

[Cras]

Doesn't make much sense to me. You see, there isn't really a possibility of something not interacting with gravity, unless there is some other space (or spacetime) in which it would exist. Since gravity is the distortion of spacetime (or, more precisely, it's the effects caused by this distortion), everything existing in this spacetime is automatically affected by it.

One of the more mainstream theories out there concerning larger extra dimensions is the Braneworld, which keeps our matter tied to the three spacial dimensions and the one time dimension, while there can be larger, but still much smaller than the three spacial dimensions we experience, hiding just behind space.

However, in this scenario, Gravity's force actually grows stronger should something travel in those extra dimensions.

Again however, space is a quantum object. Probably unlikely that anything can be small enough to fall into the "space between spaces", I guess if something could do so, it would not feel gravity at all, but not feeling gravity does not then allow for something to travel faster than light. Nor can gravity or relativity have a mechanism for something to appear to move faster than light. The only mainstream mechanism we have for that is spacial expansion that can allow for two things to fly apart from each other faster than light.

And to be clear, Gravity is the force that does the bending of spacetime. It is not the effect from the bending. While that is the best and most direct way we see and deal with gravity, the force itself is mass, energy, and pressure causing the warping, spacetime, and warping time most predominately compared to the warping space, and gravity manifests itself tous with particals wanting to fall down to the place where time flows the slowest, just as electromagnetism manifests itself to us with opposite sides of a magnet flying toward each other.

 

[RisingFury]

couldn't the whole thing be due to some relativistic "prank" of nature? - if the neutrinos don't interact with gravity, then could it be that they're not really travelling FTL - but rather that they are not getting "slowed down" by time dilation from earths gravity well in the same sense as we are?

then it's not the neutrinos that are FTL - it's the clocks that are ticking "too slow" for them :shifty:


any thoughts?

If this was true, we'd probably see showers of neutrinos running out of black holes...

 

[Fizyk]

And to be clear, Gravity is the force that does the bending of spacetime. It is not the effect from the bending.

Well, that depends on what we understand as "gravity". If we define it as mutual attraction of massive bodies (or, more generally, of bodies with some energy), then it is the effect of the curvature of spacetime. If it even makes sense to talk about a sequence of "events" here, it would be like: there is mass/energy -> spacetime is curved -> bodies fall on each other (there is gravity).

 

[RisingFury]

Well, that depends on what we understand as "gravity". If we define it as mutual attraction of massive bodies (or, more generally, of bodies with some energy), then it is the effect of the curvature of spacetime. If it even makes sense to talk about a sequence of "events" here, it would be like: there is mass/energy -> spacetime is curved -> bodies fall on each other (there is gravity).

"Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move." - John Wheeler

 

[Cras]

Well, that depends on what we understand as "gravity". If we define it as mutual attraction of massive bodies (or, more generally, of bodies with some energy), then it is the effect of the curvature of spacetime. If it even makes sense to talk about a sequence of "events" here, it would be like: there is mass/energy -> spacetime is curved -> bodies fall on each other (there is gravity).

That is fair, from the perspective of how Quantum Gravity should work, if it does indeed end up being able to be described with Gravitons, I have seen that either the graviton field in it of itself is the constituent that makes up space, or the graviton is what interacts with space to make it curve.

That Wheeler quote sums it up approximately. When we talk about thigns falling down to Earth by gravity, sure, by the cause of gravity the same as much like Protons and neutrons sticking together are the cause of the Strong Force.

But of course the strong force is not this. It is the force that attracts colour charges together to allow three quarks to form hadrons, and this can then be taken a step further to have hadrons stick together.

Gravity is warping space and time, and matter reacts to this warping in a way that can be described by Newton's mechanics (for common place observations), but apples falling to Earth is not the heart of gravity, much as Protons being "gluon'ed" to other Protons is not the heart of the strong force.

General Relativity is all about geometry. Energy, mass, and pressure warp time, and also space. And everything in the universe reacts accordingly to this curvature. Time is the prime player in this warping. It is easier to picture space as the prime player in this geometry, because obviously any sort of animation of time is going to be more artistic than practical. But time is vastly more warped by matter/energy/pressure than space is, and thigns tend to want to be in the place where time moves the slowest. And of course because the fabric of space's curvature helps in moving them there.

 

[RGClark]

sometimes i wonder... what if the speed of light is a more of a "barrier" than a "limit", wouldn't breaking it be like discovering the possibilities of supersonic flight?
i mean, it doesn't HAVE to change the known physics up to that point, but it'd rather introduce a "turning point" where the rules kinda just "change"....
my point is - supersonic flight doesn't make subsonic aerodynamics "wrong" - just puts it as a subset of a larger theory....
from a strictly historic point of view, this discovery is almost bound to happen (not saying that it did here, but maybe someday)....
if history repeats itself, as it has a way to - it would be like moving from newtonian physics to relativity... the former still applies for most "mundane" appliications - as the laws of aerodynamics can be held true invariantly if mach 1 isn't being broken
seems only natural that eventually, the speed of light could be one day discovered to be another "barrier"..... and yeah, i'm aware of how "sci-fi" this sounds....
of course - judging from how such discoveries came about in their time - mountains of skepticism are due here...
i'm just brain-farting... i don't really believe it much myself - but that shouldn't stop question from being asked, or where would we be?

That happens to be my point of view. We are nowhere near a final theory of everything. So it's not that much of a surprise that Einstein's theory had to be modified just as Newton's was.

Bob Clark

---------- Post added at 05:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:04 PM ----------

The "new results" have been obtained using the same setup with one little difference (which removes the uncertainty about emission time, but that wasn't really a problem anyway), so if there was a mistake in the previous experiment, it was repeated in the new one. No wonder results are the same, then.

True, but being able to constrain the time dispersal of the bunch is important. As has been mentioned you would get a stronger result if the distance to the detector was on the other side of the Earth, 12,000 km away, because the difference in the expected arrival time would be longer. A short burst would be more easily detected in regards to the timing.


Bob Clark

 

[Cras]

That happens to be my point of view. We are nowhere near a final theory of everything. So it's not that much of a surprise that Einstein's theory had to be modified just as Newton's was.

Yes, but neither of the quantum gravity theories suggest that speed of light is not a limit.

It makes a fun psychological argument, but the math, and for the most part the experimental data, does not suggest otherwise.

And to say we are nowhere near a final theory is a bit of hyperbole is it not? We are almost to the point where the things that cannot be answered by a more precise formulation of the ground breaking quantum gravity theories are areas that will never be able to be explained from our perspective, because nature will not allow them to be so.

 

[orb]

ScienceInsider: BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results:

It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.

Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.

{...}

Universe Today: Faster Than Light? More Like Faulty Wiring.

SPACE.com: Loose Cable Explains Faulty 'Faster-than-light' Neutrino Result


Post added:

Discovery News: Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Caused by Loose Cable?

RIA Novosti: Faster-Than-Light Particles Report ‘Debunked’

 

[Cras]

Everyone, as you were.

 

[fsci123]

ScienceInsider: BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results:

​

Universe Today: Faster Than Light? More Like Faulty Wiring.

SPACE.com: Loose Cable Explains Faulty 'Faster-than-light' Neutrino Result

I feel like my heart got ripped out...:suicide:

 

[tl8]

Well this is good news.

If you get an odd result, you expect an error rather than something else. So if this was the case then many people will sleep a bit better.

This is what science does, find answers to questions and find questions to ask.

 

[Eccentrus]

Alright then, there would be no complicated equations to explain why everything can't exceed the speed of light except for neutrino