Posted on 11/18/2011 11:53:59 AM PST by TN4Liberty
A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light -- stunning the world of physics -- has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday.
The "positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment.
While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency of its result," Ferroni added, "a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."
That is, more tests are needed, and on other experimental setups. There is still a large crowd of skeptical physicists who suspect that the original measurement done in September was an error.
CERN clocks subatomic particles traveling faster than light Video: Faster-than-light measurement shocks physicists God Particle riddle could be solved "by 2012"
Should the results stand, they would upend more than a century of modern physics.
In the first round of experiments, a massive detector buried in a mountain in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded neutrinos generated at the CERN particle accelerator on the French-Swiss border arriving 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research.
A chorus of critiques from physicists soon followed. Among other possible errors, some suggested that the neutrinos generated at CERN were smeared into bunches too wide to measure precisely.
So in recent weeks, the OPERA team tightened the packets of neutrinos that CERN sent sailing toward Italy. Such tightening removed some uncertainty in the neutrinos' speed.
The detector still saw neutrinos moving faster than light.
"One of the eventual systematic errors is now out of the way," said Jacques Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics in France, in a statement.
But the faster-than-light drama is far from over, Martino added. The OPERA team is discussing more cross-checks, he added, including possibly running a fiber the 454 miles between the sites.
For more than a century, the speed of light has been locked in as the universe's ultimate speed limit. No experiment had seen anything moving faster than light, which zips along at 186,000 miles per second.
Much of modern physics -- including Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity -- is built on that ultimate speed limit.
Should Einstein be worried?
The scientific world stopped and gaped in September when the OPERA team announced it had seen neutrinos moving just a hint faster than light.
"If it's correct, it's phenomenal," said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois, in September. "We'd be looking at a whole new set of rules" for how the universe works.
Well said!
At East Anglia University, it was deliberate fraud, not just error, or insufficiency.
A misunderstanding of physical laws is not a criminal act.
Laws of Physics are made to be broken.
Thank you for reminding me of Rep. Muskrat’s name. Yeah, he was crooked. But no more so than 90% of the Democrats in office. And waaay more entertaining.
[ I’ve never believed in the light-speed limit. Ever. ]
What if.. a photon was resting not moving at all..
Would that be called a photograph?.. or just a photo?..
http://www.physics.umn.edu/outreach/soudan/tour/
If any of you ever get up to Ely, MN be sure to take the tour of the Soudan Mine. Going down in one of the ore cars stuffed in there with everyone else is a ride in itself. But not for the claustrophobic. I do wish we had arrived an hr earlier so we could have toured the lab, but we were to late. Oh well.
....definitely can't be tracked by a flashlight.
Shouldn't that be "OPETA"?
Simple time versus distance.
So, does E still = mC^2, or does E=m*speed of neutrinos^2?
Wonder what time and distance has to say about all of this?
What if, all this time, we have been moving at the speed of light and light itself has just been sitting there stationary?
Heavy, man.
But then, according to Zeno’s paradox, nothing can actually move anyway.
But the measuring instruments only run as fast as light (electrons) so how could it measure something faster?
So when I turn on a flashlight, we all get propelled backward at 186K mps?
Cool!
I happen to suspect that there is something of an ether, something within space-time that determines this speed, perhaps due to the granularity of the universe and Planck's constant.
However, the article in Nature , goes on to say
OPERA expects the new result to rule out uncertainties due to the long timescale of the proton pulses. But concerns about the experiment’s use of the Global Positioning System to synchronize clocks at each end of the neutrino beam are unlikely to be as easily allayed, The use of GPS is novel in the field of high energy and particle physics and the same system was used for both the original experiment and the new run. Hagner also adds that she’d like to see the time measurement checked using another part of the detector, to increase confidence further.
So, apparently the Special Relativistic error in GPS may not have been accounted for. My question is simple ... why not just shoot a normal, everyday beam of light from a laser, measure that and get a baseline. If you have consistent error in your measurements, then you have something to work with. Then, try the 'magic' pulse and see if the result is the same. I like things to be simple and nearly foolproof. But, I'm just an engineer; not a physisist.
The fact that the calculated error on the pulse is 32ns, and the "faster than the speed of light" measurement is 64ns (2x the calculated error) is too close to the actual difference to be pure random chance.
It isn’t a race between the two. We can measure light by bouncing it off the moon or between two distant points.
If a soul has mass then it is bound by the speed of light. If not, then it isn’t.
I should have used “calculate” instead of “run” as in a race as you thought.
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