Posted on 09/22/2011 6:57:08 PM PDT by danielmryan
Oh...you mean the speed of dark.
Of all the particles known and unknown, why should photons be the fastest?
A friend of mine tipped me to this blog’s discussion of a very interesting book that I subsequently read.
http://accurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2008/12/frank-tiplers-god-of-multiverse-part-i.html
and here’s the book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385514255
I expect that CERN has made an error, but who knows?
ping
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news which obeys its own special laws.” Douglas Adams
It slowed you down enough that you posted twice before you could SEE that you already posted once.
Color me skeptical. Lots of things travel faster than the speed of light, if you are not in a vacuum, and there’s no vacuum between Switzerland and Italy that I know of. So, how can they really make any significant conclusions from this experiment?
Are you kidding me?
If confirmed and proven, this would be like finding out the earth is round.
It Is Fundamental To everything We Think We Know!
It’s not even a violation of Albert’s mathematics for something to travel faster than the speed of light outside a vacuum, so I am still wondering what the hubbub is about here.
Would you please put me on the String Theory ping list?
It’s not referring to the speed of light in a vacuum:
“To reach Gran Sasso, the neutrinos pushed out from a special installation at CERN - also home to the Large Hadron Collider probing the origins of the universe - have to pass through water, air and rock.”
So, as far as I can tell, they’ve discovered nothing you can’t learn from an elementary physics textbook.
The experiment was NOT done in a vacuum. From the end of the article:
“To reach Gran Sasso, the neutrinos pushed out from a special installation at CERN - also home to the Large Hadron Collider probing the origins of the universe - have to pass through water, air and rock.”
So, what’s the big deal? Am I missing something?
They aren't talking about neutrinos getting to the detector faster than some particular photons going through a medium. They are talking about C, the speed of light in a vacuum.
“Of all the particles known and unknown, why should photons be the fastest?”
Cuz they ate their Wheaties!
A vacuum has nothing to do with it. They are talking about neutrinos going faster than C, the theoretical speed of light. Not faster than some photons that were racing alongside.
Well, this part of the article suggests they ARE comparing it to the speed of light in the medium:
“Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds - or 60 billionths of a second - less than light beams would have taken.”
Might just be a poorly written article though.
Not correct. The speed limit found in relativity has nothing to do with travelling in a vacuum. Nothing with mass can accelerate to C, vacuum or not.
No, they're just talking about the distance divided by C. This wasn't a race between photons and neutrinos. It's just a matter of how fast the neutrinos were moving.
BTW, I suspect a measurement problem somewhere rather than a violation of relativity. But it would certainly be interesting if this turned out to be real.
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