Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. That's something that according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity - the famous E (equals) mc2 equation - just doesn't happen.
"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva.
it's highly possible that the speed of light isn't even a constant, so this is nothing!
This. If you bother to read even the most basic and approachable modern science materials you'll have heard about how the Big Bang happened. Spoilers for those who haven't read up: Light moved faster than it does now at first. Faster-than-light speed was achieved by light itself and should be replicable with proper application of science. Not that FTL travel matters because what you want to do is bypass distances, not go faster. It's more efficient, at least in theory.
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Correction to the above: FTL speed is actually great...as a generator of energy. It could be used to provide power for incredible things. It isn't useful as a method of travel.
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From: KanzarisKelshen | #011 This. If you bother to read even the most basic and approachable modern science materials you'll have heard about how the Big Bang happened. Spoilers for those who haven't read up: Light moved faster than it does now at first. Faster-than-light speed was achieved by light itself and should be replicable with proper application of science. Not that FTL travel matters because what you want to do is bypass distances, not go faster. It's more efficient, at least in theory.
you mean like wormholes
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Viktor Vaughn posted... From: KanzarisKelshen | #011 This. If you bother to read even the most basic and approachable modern science materials you'll have heard about how the Big Bang happened. Spoilers for those who haven't read up: Light moved faster than it does now at first. Faster-than-light speed was achieved by light itself and should be replicable with proper application of science. Not that FTL travel matters because what you want to do is bypass distances, not go faster. It's more efficient, at least in theory.
you mean like wormholes
Sorta but not quite. Imagine space as a piece of paper. Your instinct, and what you've been told at school, is that the quickest way to get from Point A on the paper to Point B is a straight line. This is a lie. In truth, the quickest way is to fold the paper until A and B overlap. 'Cheating' is the way to get anywhere in the universe. You don't need a wormhole for this. You just need a way to delete something at one point in space and recreate it in another, then transfer the information the original object contained to the clone.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the speed of light relative? Like, say you're moving at what we consider the speed of light, light will still be travelling that much faster than you?
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I place more confidence that there was some equipment failure or just plain statistical aberration than relatovity being wrong.
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RevolverSaro posted... Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the speed of light relative? Like, say you're moving at what we consider the speed of light, light will still be travelling that much faster than you?
No. Lightspeed is static (right now). If you go faster than 300kM/s you're faster than stable light.
@Newbie: No mistake. This is 100% possible and the only question is how we'll make use of it, if it's useful to us. Call me when we discover how to transfer information at this instant speed and it'll be interesting. Information is indestructible, and yet a stumbling block for tons of stuff. If we manage to relocate it anywhere we can tackle the stars very easily.
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I dunno, I seem to recall reading somewhere, I think in The Elegant Universe, that it changes speed depending on how fast you're going. I think Greene used the example of riding on a train. if you're on a train that is going 300kM/s, then light will going 300kM/s faster than you, or 600kM/s
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This isn't all that shocking. Ever since Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, rather than staying constant as Einstein hypothesized, there's been a bit of a hole in general relativity. It's been filled with dark matter, which is stuff made from something other than atoms that can't be directly observed and is instead inferred by matter around it. Now I'm not saying this is all a bunch of bs, but it does sorta remind me of all the hoops people jumped through to try to prove everything revolved around the earth in perfect circles. To find a gap here and there doesn't shock me at all.
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This. If you bother to read even the most basic and approachable modern science materials you'll have heard about how the Big Bang happened. Spoilers for those who haven't read up: Light moved faster than it does now at first.
I don't know where you're getting this from and would prefer a source. Light does travel "faster" than the constant c if you measure the current "location" of light and the location of the place it was emitted from, you'd find a distance greater than c*t (assuming same reference frame and what not) but that doesn't NECESSARILY prove that something went faster than c. In this case, the intervening space has expanded in size instead and that's the only vague thing which could be construed as "going faster than the speed of light" as far as I know, other than certain ways of interpreting some quantum mechanical phenomena which are ugly and most likely wrong.
Information is indestructible, and yet a stumbling block for tons of stuff. If we manage to relocate it anywhere we can tackle the stars very easily.
Are you talking about quantum teleportation argh.
I dunno, I seem to recall reading somewhere, I think in The Elegant Universe, that it changes speed depending on how fast you're going. I think Greene used the example of riding on a train. if you're on a train that is going 300kM/s, then light will going 300kM/s faster than you, or 600kM/s
...No it wouldn't be going at 600km/s. It would ALWAYS be at 300km/s to EVERY person who was looking at the light! So the person on the train would see it going at c and the person not on the train would see it going at c and the ONLY WAY that this can happen, and this is what made Einstein brilliant, was if you assumed that space and time itself "distorted" to provide this invariance.
This isn't all that shocking. Ever since Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, rather than staying constant as Einstein hypothesized, there's been a bit of a hole in general relativity. It's been filled with dark matter, which is stuff made from something other than atoms that can't be directly observed and is instead inferred by matter around it.
Your understanding of physics is at best woefully incomplete and patchy and at worst completely wrong and misguided.
First of all, the expansion of the universe is explained by dark energy and not dark matter, and if you knew any bit of information about either you would know that 1) They are invoked to explain completely different and nearly opposite phenomena observed in the universe 2) That dark energy isn't even an appropriate name for the "something"; physicists just had a fetish for the word dark at some point. Probably too many bad star trek specials when procrastinating on their next publication. 3) Dark Matter isn't talking about "something that's not atoms" (although the most likely candidates aren't atoms, IIRC neutrinos were one candidate) it's just talking about... stuff that doesn't shine. The Moon would qualify as dark matter if it were sufficiently far away. The reason it can only be seen by gravity is because other ways of detecting it are either too weak or nonexistent, so we have to spot perturbations in visible matter. Think about a completely dark room with a bunch of people holding different flashlights. You can identify who is holding what flashlight by just looking at it and you can identify whoever the light is currently shining on. But you can also identify the location and size of dark objects in the room by seeing where and how the people with the flashlights trip over. So you pretend you've discovered something and label that "Dark Matter" and then you go back to nerding out over 5 dots on a graph the size of a football field.
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Except that the Dark comes from Dark Matter and that means that means that it's ENERGY WHICH DOESN'T INTERACT WITH EM WAVES argggggggggghhh. Besides, the "darkness" of energy is a far deeper, mysterious one than Matter; there's a lot of possible candidates for Dark Matter and experiments used to test theories regarding it and far more "out there" theories involving energy. Call it VOID ENERGY if you have to appeal to your inner twelve year old but Dark Energy just feels off in all sorts of ways.
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Pretty cool and at the same time, not surprising. To assume we as humans know how everything works, or even are 100% certain in what we "know" is without a doubt, entirely correct, is really foolish.
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Joao Magueijo expains it in a very easy to understand manner in Faster Than The Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation. It includes a fair bit of 'clutter' to ease the concept for people who aren't too into physics, but it still explains most of it in nice detail. It's a theory that is IIRC unproven, but also unchallenged. These developments might have transformed the hypothesis into a candidate for a theorem.
As for info, not exactly. I'm talking about the idea that information doesn't decay or succumb to entropy, which emerged as a way to try and explain the time traveling paradox of an eternally traveling piece of info in the real world and which has far-reaching applications. We're not entirely sure how space folding will work yet (which was what I was taking about), and one of the theories about it is you can delete and restore matter at the same time, but that the new piece of matter will lack the information of the previous one, which is a huge problem.
To rephrase what newbie said in his two last points for everybody else: Point A says that light isn't going faster, but you are *perceiving* it as "going faster", if I read him correctly. Which sounds about right. Part B is mostly just an ownage of CM, though also an interesting explanation of dark matter. I think he's missing an explanation of how dark matter is potentially part of a zero-sum equation with the matter we can perceive but otherwise that's it.
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It's a theory that is IIRC unproven, but also unchallenged. These developments might have transformed the hypothesis into a candidate for a theorem.
...Yeah I'll take decades of experimentation over one data point. If they can replicate this result consistently, then yeah maybe half the comments in this topic would be barely warranted, but at this point the weight of evidence is still too far in favor of the status quo.
I'm talking about the idea that information doesn't decay or succumb to entropy, which emerged as a way to try and explain the time traveling paradox of an eternally traveling piece of info in the real world and which has far-reaching applications.
I think, and I am entirely not sure about this, but the physics thermodynamic concept of entropy and the informational theoretic concept of entropy are closely related and that an increase in one is roughly isomorphic to an increase in the other. Either way though, you're just stringing one word after another without making any predicitons. What the heck do you mean by a theory to delete and restore matter? What kind of matter? Atoms? Exotic negative mass matter? Spontaneous formation of particle-antiparicle pairs due to the uncertainty principle what?
I think he's missing an explanation of how dark matter is potentially part of a zero-sum equation with the matter we can perceive but otherwise that's it.
...I'm pretty sure you just got dark matter confused with dark energy again. Dark Energy is part of Einstein's Cosmological Constant zero sum thingie, but you'll just have to tell me about the specifics of what that equation is supposed to say.
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You just need a way to delete something at one point in space and recreate it in another, then transfer the information the original object contained to the clone.
I admit that most of this conversation is lost on me, but uh, if you still have to send the information across the distance, don't you still have to achieve superluminal speed to be able to travel the distances we're wanting? Then it's fundamentally no different from sending the person along at the same speed. The only change is what's being transmitted.
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From: KanzarisKelshen | #011 This. If you bother to read even the most basic and approachable modern science materials you'll have heard about how the Big Bang happened. Spoilers for those who haven't read up: Light moved faster than it does now at first. Faster-than-light speed was achieved by light itself and should be replicable with proper application of science. Not that FTL travel matters because what you want to do is bypass distances, not go faster. It's more efficient, at least in theory.
Um... Light didn't move faster at the origin of the universe, space was just expanding quickly all over.
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To all the people in this topic that don't know physics (everyone except newbie as far as I can tell): assuming modern theories of relativity are correct (and that this discovery can be explained by some sort of mistake), nothing can EVER go faster than the speed of light. See: Lorentz transformations.
