Faster Than Light?

[E-lad]

Whoa up there cowboys:

An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/ ... Science%29

[IntellectualNinja]

I don't know if neutrinos can travel faster than light, but I learned that you can detect a stream of neutrinos from a supernova a good deal of time before the star actually goes supernova. That's pretty cool.

[lehman scott]

Whoa up there cowboys:

An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/ ... Science%29

Well, it would appear that it is going to be a while before this matter is settled, which is as to be expected, I suppose. The Scientific Method hard at work yet again!

[Quasar]

I don't know if neutrinos can travel faster than light, but I learned that you can detect a stream of neutrinos from a supernova a good deal of time before the star actually goes supernova. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, I learned that too. It's because the neutrino's are emitted at the speed of light the moment the stars core stops fusion-ing and collapses under it's own gravitational pull into a neutron core, but the resulting shockwave takes several hours to push its way up through the star, and isn't visible until it actually reaches the surface.

This is all accounted for, though. If neutrino's were really as much faster than the speed of light as this experiment indicates, you'd expect to see them arriving even earlier: more than ten minutes earlier per light-year, to be precise.

So for example, Supernova 1987A (the first in which the neutrino burst was seen before the supernova) happened 168,000 lightyears away. If all neutrinos really did travel 60 nanoseconds faster, we should have seen the burst more than three years before the light from the supernova. Instead, we saw it a matter of hours before.

So either the ones we're producing in Italy are special somehow, there's still some experimental error we've missed, or something else entirely is going on.

[lehman scott]

I don't know if neutrinos can travel faster than light, but I learned that you can detect a stream of neutrinos from a supernova a good deal of time before the star actually goes supernova. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, I learned that too. It's because the neutrino's are emitted at the speed of light the moment the stars core stops fusion-ing and collapses under it's own gravitational pull into a neutron core, but the resulting shockwave takes several hours to push its way up through the star, and isn't visible until it actually reaches the surface.

This is all accounted for, though. If neutrino's were really as much faster than the speed of light as this experiment indicates, you'd expect to see them arriving even earlier: more than ten minutes earlier per light-year, to be precise.

So for example, Supernova 1987A (the first in which the neutrino burst was seen before the supernova) happened 168,000 lightyears away. If all neutrinos really did travel 60 nanoseconds faster, we should have seen the burst more than three years before the light from the supernova. Instead, we saw it a matter of hours before.

So either the ones we're producing in Italy are special somehow, there's still some experimental error we've missed, or something else entirely is going on.

Great calculations, there, Quasar. My memory was fuzzy on all this, but a quick wiki joggled my brain. There are three "flavors" of neutrino known, the electron, muon, and tau neutrinos, although the tau flavor was not directly detected until 2000. The supposed transluminal phenomena is apparently happening only with the muon variety. I am clueless as to what neutrino flavors they were capable of detecting in 1984 and 1987, nor what flavors were emitted by 1987A, but I'm sure that info is out there somewhere and being looked at. Very interesting stuff, all this.

EDIT: Another interesting fun neutrino fact is that all three flavors have different masses which are constant when traveling through space. However, when they pass through matter, their flavor, and thus their masses, can "oscillate" to one of the other two flavors.

Weird shit, particle physics.

[IntellectualNinja]

I'm no physicist, but is it possible that the collisions are causing spacetime to expand in a very short area causing the neutrinos to arrive at the detectors "early" while not violating relativity? Couldn't this also explain why we don't see such a dramatic effect with supernova?

I don't know the math or understand all the principals involved, but it seems like if matter causes spacetime to contract, destroying matter and creating new matter seems like it could do some funky stuff to empty space.

[Quasar]

Hmm... well, I'm not completely certain on the effects of spacetime expansion on the speed of light (wouldn't it have to contract?), but light travels roughly 18 meters in 60 nanoseconds. If we've somehow changed the amount of physical space between Italy and France by 18 meters... wow. I am both terrified and exhilarated by that idea, however unlikely it may be...

[cue the LHC micro black-hole destroying the earth]

[zilch]

So either the ones we're producing in Italy are special somehow, there's still some experimental error we've missed, or something else entirely is going on.

Bingo on three. This is obviously God saying "Hello!" to us in the only language atheistic science can understand: data from the fallen world. I have a proof that this must be the God of the Bible, but the margins of this page are too small to contain it.

[E-lad]

So, it seems that some guy named Quasar forgot to tighten down a cable connector: