FASTER than the speed of light.

[Bon]

Speed of light 'broken' by scientists


It was Albert Einstein, no less, who proposed more than 100 years ago that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.


But last night it emerged that the man who laid the foundations for the laws of nature may have been wrong.

The science world was left in shock when workers at the world’s largest physics lab announced they had recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light

If the findings are proven to be accurate, they would overturn one of the pillars of the Standard Model of physics, which explains the way the universe and everything within it works.

Einstein’s theory of special relativity, proposed in 1905, states that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. But researchers at the CERN lab near Geneva claim they have recorded neutrinos, a type of tiny particle, travelling faster than the barrier of 186,282 miles (299,792 kilometers) per second.

The results have so astounded researchers that American and Japanese scientists have been asked to verify the results before they are confirmed as a discovery.
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, said: “We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing.”
Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of physics.
John Ellis, a theoretical physicist, said Einstein’s theory underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics”.

Big news, i'm going to be reading up on it as the news emerges, but a fundamental change in physics as we know them could change how we view ourselves amongst the stars...

Whats your views?

 

[WihGlah]

Actually Einstein proved that it was impossible for anything to accelerate from a velocity below the speed of light to the speed of light.

Most scientists agree this means nothing can travel at or above the speed of light - but from a purely logic stance it does not. Anything already traveling above the speed of light is immune from the law.

 

[Robbo]

I thought the tachyon was a particle they theorised could travel faster than C ??

An interesting note on this, if it is true, then it means the particle, theoretically at least, would be going back in time and if correct it makes the verification impossible .... if the particle does actually go back in time then how on earth could you ever see it, it's impossible.

I know there is another theoretical event that looks as though something travels faster than the speed of light and that's the quantum entanglement effect.
I'm not going to go into detail here but it does seem as though, prima facia at least, there is something that does in fact exceed the speed of light .. exciting stuff ! I'm off to read about it.
Bon, please send me the link mate .... cheers big ears

 

[WihGlah]

An interesting note on this, if it is true, then it means the particle theoretically at least would be going back in time and if correct it makes the verification impossible .... if the particle does actually go back in time then how on earth could you ever see it, it's impossible.

You would have to set up the detector to see the particle before you sent it.

It leads to a possible paradox - you detect the particle, then forget to send it.

 

[Evil Rich]

I'd like those scientist's to work on the Facebook home page next!

 

[Robbo]

You would have to set up the detector to see the particle before you sent it.

It leads to a possible paradox - you detect the particle, then forget to send it.

If it really does go back in time, it's theoretically impossible to see it .. you can never know of its existence and the only reason they are theoretically aware of it is because when the physicists began to unravel the atomic and and subatomic world, the tachyon is a theoretical emergent property of the work they are doing.

They have never identified one but the laws of physics as understood at the moment do not preclude the existence of a particle going faster than light and therefore back in time.
This of course contradicts one of the fundamental laws of physics that nothing can travel faster than C but hey, even physicists will have to admit, the quantum world is anything but an exact science.

I read a lot on this subject and one of the quotes that seems quite fitting and also confusing is, 'if you think you can understand the quantum world then you obviously do not understand the quantum world'.

It sounds paradoxical I know but what's it's basically saying is every physicist will know, they cannot ever have a full knowledge of the quantum world [Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as just one example of knowledge limitation] and so if you say you do understand then you cannot because you have to accept that there are some things about the quantum world that are intrinsically impossible to know.

 

[Rebel Tackleberry]

General Relativity actually states that no particle with mass can be accelerated from below the speed of light to the speed of light.

It does NOT actually say that nothing can travel AT the speed of light or above it.

The equations state that it would take infinite energy to accelerate any mass to the speed of light.

Massless particles, such as photons, MUST travel at the speed of light, by virtue of being massless.

Any particles travelling faster than light, such as Tachyons, would require an infinite mount of energy to slow them down to the speed of light. As they lose energy they get faster.

This brings you into the realms of spacelike and timelike curves and the interchangeability of space and time in Einsteins 4 dimensional Spacetime.

Quantum Entanglement, as Robbo says, is one aspect where information appears to travel instantaneously and was described by Einstein as 'spooky action at a distance'. One explanation for this is due to the action of Advance and Retarded waves that travel forwards and backwards in time to exchange the information required to explain how one Entangled particle instantaneously knows the state of the other, once measured by an observer.

The beauty and non-intuitive nature of the Quantum world is displayed in the simple two slits experiment, showing that wave/particle duality is undoubtedly true, and the more and more complex variations over the years. The cleverest so far has been the use of a clever set up of prisms to allow a single photon to interact with itself and show it can act as both particle AND wave in the same experiment. Using the Quantum Tunnelling effect it would seem to split into two and interfere with itself at the detector.

I'm going to make a guess now and say that they will either discover that this 'faster than light' neutrino is an error in the data OR that they find Quantum Entanglement is responsible in some way. With the weird world of the Quantum then you have instantaneous information transfer and particles coming into and out of existence through vacuum fluctuations. If somehow Entanglement and Vacuum Fluctuations come together then you could conceivably have a particle that 'pops' out of existence and then re-appears elsewhere when it 'pops' back into existence after some Etanglement effect. This is effectively what is being done with the teleportation experiments. Maybe it's just happened as a chance thing in a high energy experiment?

@Robbo, sounds like you are as fascinated by this as me. Did you see the fairly recent claim that they think they may have a way around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle by utilising Entanglement? Can't remember the details exactly but it was something along the lines of Entangling a particle with more than one other particle and measuring position and velocity separately of the two Entangled particles. This would then enable both aspects to be deduced of the original particle, without actually observing it itself. Both values would be as exact as possible and thus violate HUP by virtue of knowing both to a finer limit than it allows.

 

[Rebel Tackleberry]

.... if the particle does actually go back in time then how on earth could you ever see it, it's impossible.

That's interesting. The fact that time slows for anything travelling at an appreciable fraction of c is verified practically by the fact that the results of some cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere actually reach ground level.

When a very high energy (velocity) cosmic ray impacts atoms in the upper atmosphere, they can cause the creation of unstable atomic nuclei, in the same way as a particle collider. Now, some of these created atomic nuclei should decay into more stable nuclei BEFORE they reach the ground. Due to the time dilation effect it appears, from our perspective, that they 'live' longer than they should, to reach detectors on the ground. From the nuclei point of view it would appear that space contracts and the ground is a lot closer, meaning they can reach it within their 'lifetime'. That's where space/time relativity comes in, it depends on the observers frame of reference as to whether they see time stretch or space contract.

Now, imagine a particle that travels faster than light, and backwards in time, hitting a detector on the ground. What would you see? You'd probably see a normal collision event. The only way to know how fast it was travelling would be to know that the same particles are also detected high up in the atmosphere. So, if travelling backwards in time then what you would see, from our frame of temporal reference, would be particles in the ground detector FIRST and then the high level detector. So, wouldn't a time travelling particle appear to us to be travelling FROM the ground and INTO space?

We'd still measure those nuclei/particles as having travelled BETWEEN the detectors at faster than the speed of light, but we'd need to reverse our observed temporal order of the events to gain the true direction of travel.

As soon as we get into problems with causality then we're going to struggle to understand how things work, in the same way no-one can intuitively understand the two slits experiment.

My head hurts now!

 

[Robbo]

General Relativity actually states that no particle with mass can be accelerated from below the speed of light to the speed of light.

It does NOT actually say that nothing can travel AT the speed of light or above it.

The equations state that it would take infinite energy to accelerate any mass to the speed of light.

Massless particles, such as photons, MUST travel at the speed of light, by virtue of being massless.

Any particles traveling faster than light, such as Tachyons, would require an infinite mount of energy to slow them down to the speed of light. As they lose energy they get faster.

This brings you into the realms of spacelike and timelike curves and the interchangeability of space and time in Einsteins 4 dimensional Spacetime.

Quantum Entanglement, as Robbo says, is one aspect where information appears to travel instantaneously and was described by Einstein as 'spooky action at a distance'. One explanation for this is due to the action of Advance and Retarded waves that travel forwards and backwards in time to exchange the information required to explain how one Entangled particle instantaneously knows the state of the other, once measured by an observer.

The beauty and non-intuitive nature of the Quantum world is displayed in the simple two slits experiment, showing that wave/particle duality is undoubtedly true, and the more and more complex variations over the years. The cleverest so far has been the use of a clever set up of prisms to allow a single photon to interact with itself and show it can act as both particle AND wave in the same experiment. Using the Quantum Tunnelling effect it would seem to split into two and interfere with itself at the detector.

@Robbo, sounds like you are as fascinated by this as me. Did you see the fairly recent claim that they think they may have a way around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle by utilising Entanglement? Can't remember the details exactly but it was something along the lines of Entangling a particle with more than one other particle and measuring position and velocity separately of the two Entangled particles. This would then enable both aspects to be deduced of the original particle, without actually observing it itself. Both values would be as exact as possible and thus violate HUP by virtue of knowing both to a finer limit than it allows.

Hi Reb, I think I'm right in remembering you are a physicist of some kind and well able to have pertinent views and opinions on such a subject and so I'll try to keep my comments as precise as I possibly can but please feel free to enlighten any ignorance I might display.

I think when you talk about the photon necessarily moving at C because it is massless is slightly misleading because I always thought the restmass was zero but it acquired mass by virtue of it going so fact?

As for being fascinated by all this?
Yes, I am because I have always tried to reconcile the sometimes [and maybe predictable contradiction] disparate worlds of science and religion.

I have always been confused about something and I've scoured the net and not found an answer to this the following problem; most scientists always condemn infinite regression as a reason why there cannot be a god ... I can't subscribe to this; I appreciate their thought process and can acknowledge the logic but we are talking about [if in fact you believe there to be] a god here and just because us pathetic humans cannot reconcile the notion of infinite regression when considering the birth of the universe and the consequential question of then who created god is grounds for denial?

Scientists use this logical conundrum as some sort of proof there is no god .. to me, this is completely illogical and there's an arrogant presumption here that humans are always able to understand this universe when in fact, this is just one case where we cannot always understand the nature of god.
You are obviously well aware of the hierarchical notion that a creator [of whatever you like but in this case the universe] must always be more complex than the creation .. a computer is a great example or indeed any creation of us humans.

With that in mind, I think to assume we can conclude the non-existence of a god on the basis of a negative [the fact we cannot come up with god's creator] is such an unreasonable position to adopt.
Reb, your views or maybe you can tell me where I'm wrong, either will be appreciated.

 

[no-infernomark]

although, i have only just started studying the sciences, one thing i will always remember is nothing is impossible, its just unlikely, by virtue all science is theory and is only accurate until we find out otherwise. one day we could wake up and the alarm clock i so regularly throw on the floor could float. then the laws of physics and what we know is proverbially shagged. so im open minded that this is correct or not

robbo enlighten me on how if it goes faster than the speed of light that it would go back in time? logically dont understand this.