Speed of light not the upper limit

Snick · Sep 22, 2011

It appears that the speed of light is not the upper limit of speed. "it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light." That shouldn't be surprising, since the speed of light as the upper limt was an assumption.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Mutive · Sep 22, 2011

Hasn't that been known for a while? Tachyons, I believe go faster (but not slower) than the speed of light. It appears to be a barrier, from what I can recall...but not one that is insurmountable. Also, a lot of the "spooky action at a distance" stuff seems to be instantaneous.

Quantum =/= relativity and vice versa, I think is what a lot of it comes down to...(form the little I understand. Both are too freaking weird for me to have any real intuition on them.)

benbradley · Sep 22, 2011

Durn it, I was gonna post this - I saw it in my Twitter Feed hours ago (@TranscendentMan) and just read more about it on another forum (diyaudio). There are several news stories showing up with this, here's another:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/22/cern_spots_ftl_neutrinos/

Mutive said:
Hasn't that been known for a while? Tachyons, I believe go faster (but not slower) than the speed of light.

Tachyon is just a name given to such a theoretical particle, but it hasn't been detected, furthermore there's no way to detect one if it exists.

I'm suspicious of this announcement, and I suspect there's some calculation they did wrong somewhere, and these neutrinos are actually going just under the speed of light.
Even the people announcing this appear to be doubtful of their own findings, and they're publishing in part to see if others can find their error.

But if it's real, it's a big deal, and it won't be just the kooks and trash rags saying "Einstein was WRONG!" and "Scientests Baffled!" - it'll even be a bigger ****ing deal than Universal Health Care.

Al Stevens · Sep 22, 2011

I am mildly skeptical. Remember cold fusion?

Maxx · Sep 22, 2011

Mutive said:
Hasn't that been known for a while? Tachyons, I believe go faster (but not slower) than the speed of light. It appears to be a barrier, from what I can recall...but not one that is insurmountable. Also, a lot of the "spooky action at a distance" stuff seems to be instantaneous.

Quantum =/= relativity and vice versa, I think is what a lot of it comes down to...(form the little I understand. Both are too freaking weird for me to have any real intuition on them.)

Special relativity should be completely consistant with any quantum formalism. In fact, quantum theories that fail to work in terms of special relativity don't have much plausibility. General relativity may be a different story (as may the inflationary field, the Higgs and or Dark Energy).
Of course particles can excede the speed of light in a particular medium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

So maybe the neutrinos are doing something like particles that are not travelling in a vaccum have already been observed to do.

Snick · Sep 22, 2011

benbradley said:
I'm suspicious of this announcement, and I suspect there's some calculation they did wrong somewhere, and these neutrinos are actually going just under the speed of light.
Even the people announcing this appear to be doubtful of their own findings, and they're publishing in part to see if others can find their error.

You may be right about that, but there is serious research going on into cold fusion.

But if it's real, it's a big deal, and it won't be just the kooks and trash rags saying "Einstein was WRONG!" and "Scientests Baffled!" - it'll even be a bigger ****ing deal than Universal Health Care.

Whether Einstein was right or wrong isn't important, because he set the spped of light as a limit as an axiom for his relativity, and there was no need for that assumption. Sp4cial Relativity doesn't need that assumption, and most of General Relativity doesn't need it either. Cutting free from that limit might make some things easier to understand.

movieman · Sep 22, 2011

Mutive said:
Quantum =/= relativity and vice versa, I think is what a lot of it comes down to...(form the little I understand. Both are too freaking weird for me to have any real intuition on them.)

Not really true. You only get 'spooky' effects if you use non-relativistic quantum mechanics, and shouldn't be surprised that if you use non-relativistic quantum mechanics then you it predicts things that travel faster than light.

Once you use relativistic quantum mechanics the problem goes away; look up the Transactional Interpretation, for example.

As for this result I'm pretty sure it will turn out to be a measuring error or misinterpretation. But there's still the 0.00001% chance that it's a real effect that will have major implications.

Dommo · Sep 23, 2011

Until it's verified by the guys at Fermilab, I'll chock this one up to systemic error.

Snick · Sep 23, 2011

Dommo said:
Until it's verified by the guys at Fermilab, I'll chock this one up to systemic error.

There's a good chance that you are right. The thoughts that researchers have about their instruments' error is often wrong. On the other hand, the result may be telling us something important about the nature of space. We will have to wait for conformation from another source before we rewrite the books, but we should start thinking about the implications.

MJNL · Sep 24, 2011

Yeah, all Einstien's math really says is that the speed of light can't be reached by anything other than a photon, be they speeding up or slowing down. So it's perfectly conceivable within his theory that something could already be traveling faster. It's easy to see this with a simple graphed calculus equation. So, nothing has violated the theory until some thing traveling slower exceeds the speed, or something traveling faster is slowed down to below the speed.

This is why journalists can never be trusted when it comes to science news. They don't have the background to accurately report on it.

blacbird · Sep 24, 2011

A perceptive commentary on this event, the conclusion of which is, "for the moment, remain skeptical":

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44641516/ns/technology_and_science-science/

caw

Snick · Sep 24, 2011

MJNL said:
Yeah, all Einstien's math really says is that the speed of light can't be reached by anything other than a photon, be they speeding up or slowing down. So it's perfectly conceivable within his theory that something could already be traveling faster. It's easy to see this with a simple graphed calculus equation. So, nothing has violated the theory until some thing traveling slower exceeds the speed, or something traveling faster is slowed down to below the speed.

This is why journalists can never be trusted when it comes to science news. They don't have the background to accurately report on it.

That is completely true, but they were observing neutrinos, which were created in an observed location that was going at less than the speed of light when they were created. I don't know the details of how they were created, but it was in a super-collider, so things would have been moving fast but under the speed of light.

Manuel Royal · Sep 25, 2011

This xkcd comic expresses my thoughts.

benbradley · Sep 25, 2011

Manuel Royal said:
This xkcd comic expresses my thoughts.

That kind of reminds me of that Scott Adams controversy, and here's your post in that thread:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6068832#post6068832
Fortunately for that xkcd author (his name is Randall Munroe, I had to click on 'about' to find it), he's better at getting his point across than was Scott Adams.

thothguard51 · Sep 25, 2011

Snick said:
I don't know the details of how they were created, but it was in a supercollider, so things would have been moving fast but under the speed of light.

From what I read, the experiment was from the Lucerne site to a site in Italy and not a part of the supercollider.

Fermilab in Chicago did this a while back between their site and a site in Minnesota, but they figured the margin for error was too great at the time for the calculations to be reliable.

blacbird · Sep 25, 2011

Mutive said:
Hasn't that been known for a while? Tachyons, I believe go faster (but not slower) than the speed of light.

Tachyons are completely theoretical particles, invented by SF writers as far as I'm aware, analogous to unicorns and dragons, invented by mythologists.

caw

movieman · Sep 25, 2011

blacbird said:
Tachyons are completely theoretical particles, invented by SF writers as far as I'm aware, analogous to unicorns and dragons, invented by mythologists.

At least the unicorn patent appears to have expired:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4429685.html

froley · Oct 2, 2011

I wonder how many budding SF writers have used this discovery already as a 'totally plausible' spaceship fuel.

benbradley · Nov 9, 2011

This article asks an important but complicated question about FTL neutrinos

"Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?"

But at least the abstract is succinct and clear:
http://eprintweb.org/S/article/hep-ph/1110.2832

Marzioli · Nov 17, 2011

Also, wasn't it discovered the Universe was expanding faster than the speed of light (at its edge) and, therefore (perhaps?) that even light is expanding faster at certain points in space-time?

If not, let me just say I studied philosophy in college and we didn't go over that bit in our "What is Love" class.

Arcadia Divine · Nov 17, 2011

Izatright said:
Also, wasn't it discovered the Universe was expanding faster than the speed of light (at its edge) and, therefore (perhaps?) that even light is expanding faster at certain points in space-time?

If not, let me just say I studied philosophy in college and we didn't go over that bit in our "What is Love" class.

I know it's expanding faster and faster, but I don't know about the speed of light part. I assume it's expanding faster than light. There probably is something a lot faster than light, it only seems logical. I would be interested to hear what they call this.

Astronomer · Nov 19, 2011

Only over great distances does the "expanding faster than the speed of light" notion come into play. If space expands at one percent per year (a VERY fast rate, indeed, but certainly not the speed of light), then two objects a hundred light years apart will never be able to see one another because the space between them is expanding at (initially, then faster than) the rate of one light year per year.

So space isn't expanding faster, farther away. It's likely (quantum foam/multiverse considerations notwithstanding) expanding at the same rate everywhere in the universe. It's just that with uniform expansion, things farther away move away faster than things nearby. And if sufficiently far away, they move away faster than the speed of light.

Maxx · Nov 21, 2011

Astronomer said:
So space isn't expanding faster, farther away. It's likely (quantum foam/multiverse considerations notwithstanding) expanding at the same rate everywhere in the universe. It's just that with uniform expansion, things farther away move away faster than things nearby. And if sufficiently far away, they move away faster than the speed of light.

As I understand it, Spacetime (and all the vacuum expectation values it contains) expands (or contracts) exactly the same as the gravitational metric. So, between here and the Andromeda Galaxy, spacetime is actually contracting, and somewhere beyond that local group metric, spacetime is expanding. If this isn't so then there is something like an aether (the dark matter and/or the dark energy) that is operating alongside the gravitational metric.
That is possible, but as far as I know, there is no evidence of such an aether-like non-metric energy out there.

Snick · Nov 21, 2011

Maxx said:
As I understand it, Spacetime (and all the vacuum expectation values it contains) expands (or contracts) exactly the same as the gravitational metric. So, between here and the Andromeda Galaxy, spacetime is actually contracting, and somewhere beyond that local group metric, spacetime is expanding. If this isn't so then there is something like an aether (the dark matter and/or the dark energy) that is operating alongside the gravitational metric.
That is possible, but as far as I know, there is no evidence of such an aether-like non-metric energy out there.

While that may be right, it is uncertain, because the way that such distances is meanured (red shift and relative brightness of some stars0 require assumptions that require the speed of light to be a constant to be completely valid.

Maxx · Nov 21, 2011

Snick said:
While that may be right, it is uncertain, because the way that such distances is meanured (red shift and relative brightness of some stars0 require assumptions that require the speed of light to be a constant to be completely valid.

You may be onto something, Snick. There are some interesting theories about generating metric gravity out of
some kind of non-metric quantum gravity.

I don't understand it, so you're on your own, but you could
google "gravity non-metric" for a look at the theorists and their papers.

Please post something here if you find some kind of just GR summary you think I might understand.

Speed of light not the upper limit

Snick

Mutive

Blissfully Clueless

benbradley

It's a doggy dog world

Al Stevens

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here

Snick

movieman

Dommo

On Mac's double secret probation.

Snick

MJNL

A Little Lost

blacbird

Snick

Manuel Royal

benbradley

It's a doggy dog world

thothguard51

A Gentleman of a refined age...

blacbird

movieman

froley

benbradley

It's a doggy dog world

Marzioli

Could be worse!

Arcadia Divine

Astronomer

I'm an excellent poofreader.

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here

Snick

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here