Could be the biggest news EVER

Fred Sherman

Well-known member
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”.
This could be the most exciting news ever and could change what we view as our limits to move among the stars.

However...

I suspect what will be the case is that a number of neutrinos were able to pass through Einstein Rosen bridges in the quantum foam. They don't travel faster than light, it only appears that way to the external observer.
 
Two minutes too late matey, I already posted this news. But I'll let you have the topic as you presented yours better than I did :) Interesting/exciting news though.
 
While the immediate effects of this discovery will be small and insignificant, the long term effect will be one that will out last us all.
 
I wasn't too surprised when I heard the news earlier today. It makes perfect sense that certain things can travel faster than light. How else would the aliens get here to probe us if it was impossible?

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
 
The thing that irks me is they're saying "Einstein got it wrong". Well, no he didn't. We know that for a fact. The speed of light, as an asymptotic limit, is a consequence of special relativity. We know SR is not a theory, but a fact, thanks to GPS satellites. Earth based receivers must include a time dilation correction to account for the SR, because the speed of the satellites' orbits means that time slows down slightly for them to the tune of 8 microseconds per day.

So, if Einstein was right, then he can't be wrong now. Besides, he said it was for particles traveling in a vacuum. A neutrino is a subatomic quantum particle, a lepton. So it cannot exist in a vacuum at the quantum level, it exists in the quantum foam. So it makes perfect sense that neutrinos propelled throughout the quantum foam would encounter Einstein Rosen bridge in the foam. The speed of light isn't violated, since the particle does not travel faster than the speed of light in the bridge, but only appears to from the reference of normal space-time.

So, this doesn't mean Einstein was wrong. This is going to be the first scientific proof of the existence of wormholes. How cool will that be?
 
Dang Fred, you're absolute about everything, aren't you? You may be right and you may be wrong. Your "proof", however, is just supporting evidence, just like gravity's effect on light. Please, all evidence seems to support it, but even that doesn't mean we "know that for a fact". They could just as well be the result of something we don't understand yet. I'll certainly give you that a lot of your explanation was enlightening! Thanks for that.o_O

And I agree, it's not proof that Einstein was wrong, just that there may be more going on than we know.

And yeah, it's all very cool.(y)

(No, I'm not following you, sure looks like it though! Kinda funny in a way, we actually seem to share many of the same interests. Same evidence, different conclusions, go figure.)
 
Wow, amazing stuff.

I also don't think this makes Einstein "wrong" as such. I also doubt Einstein ever definitively, totally, completely ruled out the possibility of Faster than Speed of Light, although he is popularly quoted as saying so, I think that might be wrong as many so called famous quotes are. But then again, I could be wrong, I don't claim to be a great student of Einstein.
 
Wow, amazing stuff.

I also don't think this makes Einstein "wrong" as such. I also doubt Einstein ever definitively, totally, completely ruled out the possibility of Faster than Speed of Light, although he is popularly quoted as saying so, I think that might be wrong as many so called famous quotes are. But then again, I could be wrong, I don't claim to be a great student of Einstein.
Fred can probably fill this in better as he seems to have a deeper understanding. IIRC Einstein saw that as something approached the speed of light, time would slow down and stop at the speed of light. I think even he had trouble though with greater than light speed. Does SR totally preclude >c?
 
The Scientists urged caution ... they feel the result is so unlikely ... they figure they made an error.

The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second.
The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second.
The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos?newsfeed=true

Might be a spurious result.
 
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Seriously though, I have doubt CERN is going to have problems finding funding for the next few years if this turns out to be true.
 
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