Posted on 02/22/2012 2:21:19 PM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets
It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.
Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
His peer says, "Why do you say that?"
He smiles and replies, "Because they never have Mass."
hahaha brilliant
“I canna change the laws of physics”
Why does movement and speed have anything to do with time.....I move at the speed of light.....so what? Time slows down for me?
As I predicted.
LMAO!!
http://www.kilty.com/bulge.htm
Agreed - and that they caught it sooner rather than later. Not like the “Palmdale Bulge” described above. Surveying indicated changes in ground elevation in California, prompting fears of earthquakes, and more surveying and monitoring and millions of dollars and years of study.
“Oops - surveying errors. Sorry!”
Seems like measuring something FTL with non-FTL equipment is going to be a problem.
It's easier than it sounds. Send a light signal down a path at the same time the >C signal flies down the same path. Measure the difference in arrival times. Light travels about a a foot per nanosecond (10E-9). Cheap lab equipment can easily measure down to a nanosecond. Of course, more bucks, more Buck Rogers.
Thank you, RAdm Grace Hopper. She handed out pieces of copper wire that were a nano-second long. But she never said whether that C was through free space or through copper. ;)
I still see problems with accurate measurement.
/johnny
Free space.
They have no rest mass, and posited gravitons also travel at the speed of light. Anything with a non zero rest mass cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
There are lots of ways of synchronizing clocks using two way signal exchange, that calibrate out path delay and errors in propagation. The common software application NTP is one of them, though it is only intended to keep clocks approximately synchronized.
Say you want to synchronize two clocks, connected by a two communications channel. A sends B his time, then B echos it back to A. A timestamps the returned time and subtracts it from his clock and sends half the difference back to B with his time so B can advance his clock by that amount to account for delay. Reverse the process and repeat. Iterate until the mean squared difference stabilizes and you know you’ve converged to the best you can do.
GPS works on a slighly different principle, with both parties observing a number of synchronized clocks with pretty precisely known delays and adjusting their clocks to agree. This experiment depended on GPS. Even when everything is working perfectly, GPS is only good to about 28 nanoseconds RMS, but it is likely that the timing errors were highly correlated between the two stations, so they should have been able to acheive mutual synchronization down to the single nanosecond level.
In this experiment the light path is obstructed by the mass of the earth.
Note: this topic is from Feb 22. Thanks Lonesome in Massachussets.
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