- Joined
- Feb 13, 2008
- Messages
- 5,398
- Reaction score
- 8
- Points
- 0
- Location
- Khimki
- Website
- tigerofsiberia.livejournal.com
Could another random stream of neutrinos that came from a different source, interfere with the measurements?
What about Tachyons? Eisteins theory never rulled out particles traveling faster than the speed of light, just anthing subluminal can't travel faster and anything superluminal can't travel slower, so the speed of light was more like a barrier than an upper limit.
The Neutrinos could have been traveling faster than light
Just heard this on the news. Einstein must be turning in his grave hearing this.
Tachyons have negative mass, and do not fit at all in modern theroies of quantum gravity.
So what's the big deal? I break the speed of light all the time when I'm playing orbiter.
Wrong. Tachyons are supposed to have an imaginary mass
{...}
So why aren't they enthusiastically claiming discovery from the highest mountaintop? They recognize that, as the saying goes, extraordinary results demand extraordinary evidence. "Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be much more prudent," Ereditato told The Guardian. "A result is never a discovery until other people confirm it." That's why the team spent six months double, triple, and quadruple checking their analysis. "If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out."
Don't Believe the Hype (Yet)
I'm sorry to report that, for all the hoopla, the general consensus that has emerged over the last couple of days is that (a) it's a really interesting, potentially exciting result, but (b) it probably won't hold up over time. Even the OPERA team isn't entirely convinced they're right; they're putting their work out there and basically asking their colleagues to poke holes in it and find anything they've missed. These are world-class physicists, mind you, but nobody is perfect, particularly when it comes to such tricky measurements.
{...}
{...}
The things you need to know about this result are:By the latter point I don’t mean to impugn the abilities or honesty of the experimenters, who are by all accounts top-notch people trying to do something very difficult. It’s just a very difficult experiment, and given that the result is so completely contrary to our expectations, it’s much easier at this point to believe there is a hidden glitch than to take it at face value. All that would instantly change, of course, if it were independently verified by another experiment; at that point the gleeful jumping up and down will justifiably commence.
- It’s enormously interesting if it’s right.
- It’s probably not right.
This isn’t one of those annoying “three-sigma” results that sits at the tantalizing boundary of statistical significance. The OPERA folks are claiming a six-sigma deviation from the speed of light. But that doesn’t mean it’s overwhelmingly likely that the result is real; it just means it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that the result is simply a statistical fluctuation. There is another looming source of possible error: a “systematic effect,” i.e. some unknown miscalibration somewhere in the experiment or analysis pipeline. (If you are measuring something incorrectly, it doesn’t matter that you measure it very carefully.) In particular, the mismatch between the expected and observed timing amounts to tens of nanoseconds; but any individual “event” takes the form of a pulse that is spread out over thousands of nanoseconds. Extracting the signal is a matter of using statistics over many such events — a tricky business.
{...}
Hey, but to get speed of light we need infinite energy:blink: I'm suspicious how does they get it.
I wonder if we would be able to notice if the speed of light would change?
Many things are bound into it, so it's likely that all the process would alter respectively.
Is it an independent constant or a complex relation in the structure of underlying laws?
Can physical constants actually be tweaked, like the proponents of the a-little-off-and-we-would-not-be-there arguments like so much?
We look at this new experiment through prior knowledge and fiction, what if it's something else entirely, besides an error?