2nd test affirms faster-than-light particles

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.

"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.

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.

This following is referring to a set of experiments done over ten years ago:

“Einstein argued that [the phenomenon of nonlocality] violated both common sense and his own theory of special relativity, which prohibits the propagation of effects faster than the speed of light; quantum mechanics must therefore be an incomplete theory. In 1980, however, a group of French physicists carried out a version of the EPR experiment and showed that it did indeed give rise to spooky actions. (The reason that the experiment does not violate special relativity is that one cannot exploit nonlocality to transmit information.)”-The End of Science, p. 86, John Horgan

Both Einstein and the writer of the paragraph above are wrong. Their error stems from their misunderstanding of what constitutes language. If one simply says that no thing can travel faster than light, they may be correct, granted both the light and whatever ‘thing’ are moving within the same space and that the ‘thing’ is not gravity. However, language is not a thing that is transmitted across space between two people. It is shared symbolism based on common experience that allows members to assign the same or similar meaning to a phenomenon common to both of them (either ‘exterior’, objective, or ‘interior’, subjective, and common to both of them either through experience or language). Sometimes that phenomenon is produced by one, sometimes by the other, sometimes by a third person. That phenomenon could be something as ‘simple’ as a raised middle finger or a circled forefinger and thumb. The phenomenon may or may not be common to everyone’s perception (the blind or the deaf) or experience (someone who doesn’t understand sign language or Braille). If, however, meaning is attributed to the phenomenon, the meaning already resides inside those who perceive it by means of the phenomenon.

As a simple example, in the United States we use the circled thumb and forefinger with the remaining fingers spread and splayed to indicate ‘okay!’. We speak of the meaning of the sign being ‘conveyed’ or ‘transmitted’ or ‘moving’ between the two parties, but that’s just a misleading metaphor reinforced by our common experience of hearing a shout from down the block or receiving a letter in the mail we know to have come from halfway around the world in two weeks. The only thing moving, however, between the two individuals making and receiving the hand sign are the light waves being reflected from the circled thumb and forefinger of the one into the eyes of the other. There is literally no transmission of ‘meaning’ or ‘information’.

To demonstrate this, have an American signal ‘okay’ to a Brazilian and then ask each what meaning was ‘transmitted’. The American will say that he was transmitting ‘okay’ to the Brazilian. The Brazilian will say he was receiving from the American the invitation to ‘Eff me’ or ‘Eff you’, depending on what he considered the context to be. The meaning didn’t mysteriously transmute from one to the other message somewhere in the air between the two people. There was no meaning being transmitted at all. The meaning was separately attributed by each party to the sign based, in this case, on dissimilar symbolism sharing a common physical referent.

The same is true whether the means of conveying meaning (again, the metaphor of “convey” misleads) is through the symbolic means of written language, spoken language, signed language; or a more abstract level of symbolism such as smoke signals, flags, bent twigs; or the merely mechano/electrical or electronic or photographic transduction and transmittal from one place to another of the ‘stuff’ used to represent language.

The ‘stuff’, whether sight or sound, is shaped by language and is presented to the senses. It is thus available to be received and meaningfully interpreted by another who has the sufficient experience and linguistic ability to make sense of it. This is true whether it is one first grader talking to another about Barney or a philologist working to decipher an unknown language by referring to his existing knowledge of language. In the case of all these media, it is probably true that none of them can be moved faster than light. In this sense there can be no faster than light communication, not because information can’t travel faster than light, not because it isn’t possible that one person in one location could communicate with another person in another location in less time than it takes for light to travel between the two locations, but because these means used to make perceptible the language cannot be conveyed faster than light.

Now, given a means that is capable of instantaneous effects at a distance, such communication would be possible. Not only is it possible, it has already happened. In the French experiment Horgan referred to above, the experimenters needed a means to determine that the experiment had indeed been successful. The means was not the experimental device, but a set of criteria they chose based on their understanding of the phenomenon they were attempting to manipulate. They chose a set of criteria that would give them an unambiguous answer to their question. They all began with a shared set of expectations of what would or would not constitute a successful experiment, then they manipulated (so to speak) the medium and looked for an effect.

Again, the experimenters already knew what to look for which would confirm to them that the experiment was successful. If they didn’t have this shared understanding they would have been even worse off than two people using the okay sign without either knowing the nationality of the other. In that case, at least, each thinks he knows what the other is attempting to communicate. But if one person causes something to happen and another records and perceives the effect and both look at that record and separately arrive at the same unambiguous conclusion based on their prior shared understanding, then nonlocalization was used to ‘convey’ information.

Furthermore, it would be possible for one experimenter to know what to look for and what it would mean and yet keep the other in the dark and still be convinced that the experiment was successful based merely on the observations of the second experimenter who knew neither but could describe what he saw, just as someone could accurately record the sequence of puffs of smoke in a smoke signal system with no idea of what they were being used to signify. In this case there would have been no communication between the two. There was no prior understanding shared that when you see ‘this’ I mean ‘that’, that when you see the photon move in this direction, it’s because I caused its twin to be deflected in that direction. Although there was no communication, the first experimenter could look at the results recorded by the second experimenter and be sure that what he intended to send was what he actually did send. Everything necessary for communication at superluminal speed was there except for the second experimenter’s ability to interpret it.

But when one experimenter can influence one particle and the other particle at a distance is seen by another experimenter to act in a consistent and predictable manner according to an agreed-upon criterion, then communication has taken place and has done so via the experimental device. In this particular case the device does not happen to be limited by distance and time in its effects. If I can cause a photon to move at will left, left, right, or up, up, down, or to appear green, green, red--whatever, then I have in place the basis for communication; all I have to do is arrange a commonly shared meaning to be assigned to whatever permutations of the effect I want to cause.

Whatever problems there may be in developing and using the technology, violating special relativity is not one of them.

Your essay is correct, but then falls apart in the last sentence.
Here’s why.

QM-wise, here is a bit of what’s going on.

Imagine two particles come into existence at the same time as a result of some quantum state change.

This kind of thing happens all the time, it’s part of the background ZPE field.

Now particles can be said to have a property called spin. Now spin is a quantum property and as such, can be said to not exist in a real sense UNTIL IT IS MEASURED.

In this case, because we are talking about conjugated particles (they were both “birthed” by the same event at the same time), the total amount of spin is zero. If we measure one and find the spin is “up”, then the other will, if/when it is measured, have a spin “down”.

What Bells inequality says is basically IF this state of affairs it true, THEN Einsteins ideas of locality break down.

The experiments you talk of are the Aspect experiments. They were able to successfully show that once the spin of one particle was measured, the other particle ALWAYS shows the right spin.

People look at it and think about it and then think well, thats no big deal. If I pull a sock out of my sock drawer and it’s a right footed sock, then I KNOW the other sock left is a left footed sock.

But that’s not how QM works. The spin isn’t there before we measure it. It can be said to be there BECAUSE we measure it.

Imagine you had a bag that had two pairs of sunglasses in it. One was red and the other blue(lens-wise)

Somewhere away from you there was a person wearing a pair of sunglasses that were designed so that what you saw when you put on a pair, he would see.

So you can reach in the bag and pull out a pair and put them on and then see everything red and they would see the same. Or blue, if you saw blue.

But here’s the kicker, and this is why the last sentence of your essay fails:
Your choice of sunglasses is totally random. You CAN’T control which color you pick.

You do know that IF you see red, the other person will also see red, but you have no way of setting up any kind of messaging system because you cannot pick what you will see.

Mathematically, Bells theorem is quite easy to understand. But it implies something beyond Einsteins limited spacetime view of the universe.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.