Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC

A news article where both the scientists and the reporter understate the claims, publish the data, and ask other teams to please prove them wrong.<p>I like this. Most of the time the reporters overstate the research, the scientists keep the data secret, and the general public is left scratching their heads.

If this result is valid then it would mean that neutrinos are capable of traveling .0025% faster than light. There was a supernova that we observed in 1987 (SN 1987) that occurred 168,000 light years away from us. A neutrino burst was observed in 3 different labs about 3 hours before the light was observed. If neutrinos are capable of traveling .0025% faster than the speed of light then why would we observe these neutrinos at a time that is consistent with them traveling at almost exactly the speed of light (slightly less due to their finite mass)? A difference of .0025% would correspond to the neutrinos arriving 4 years earlier! This is the first experimental contradiction to this result that pops into my head but there are probably many more.<p>Plain and simple, this is most likely due to a systematic error in their experiment that isn't being properly taken into account. The result would tear apart well established theories that have been tested time and time again in thousands of different ways. Of course that doesn't mean that they're absolutely right but it does mean that any contradictory result has to be initially taken with a grain of salt (kudos to the article writer for doing this). It's easy to mess up a calibration in such a complicated system and 60 nanosecond errors could potentially pop up. It will be interesting to see the results from other labs but I would advise against getting your hopes up for any new physics.

There was an experiment where an impulse of light came out the other end of a material faster than light could have traveled through vacuum in the same space. The eventual explanation was as follows - imagine that your outgoing bunch of photons looks like this: :::... The first three photons are "invisible" because there is so few of them that they are below the equipment sensitivity. The second group of six particles is more dense and so they are visible to equipment. Hence, it is deemed that the light has "entered" the material when the second group has entered, long past after the first one actually did. Having entered the material the first group has triggered release of energy from the material, and the second group was partially consumed by the material (energizing it for the next time around). The outgoing bunch looked like this: ...::: And this time it was the first group of photons that was detected. So the apparent speed of the beam was higher than the speed of light. However that's not because the same particles traveled faster than light, but because the peak energy of the entire bunch has shifted forward during travel. If you try hard enough, the light will have "exited" the material before it has "entered".<p>Similar thing could be happening here.

Similar results seem to have already been obtained in the past<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Speed</a><p>QUOTE<p>In the early 1980s, first measurements of neutrino speed were done using pulsed pion beams (produced by pulsed proton beams hitting a target). The pions decayed producing neutrinos, and the neutrino interactions observed within a time window in a detector at a distance were consistent with the speed of light. This measurement has been repeated using the MINOS detectors, which found the speed of 3 GeV neutrinos to be <i>1.000051(29)</i> c. While the central value is higher than the speed of light, the uncertainty is great enough that it is very likely that the true velocity is not greater than the speed of light. This measurement set an upper bound on the mass of the muon neutrino of 50 MeV at 99% confidence.<p>/QUOTE<p>The value looks awfully like what we have in front of us today, but the uncertainty was too big to investigate further<p>EDIT : actual paper :<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0437" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0437</a>

I desperately want to believe that this will somehow enable us to live in a Star-Trek future, even though I'm sure it won't.<p>Would someone with some knowledge of physics care to break down the ramifications of this (if it's not some sort of measurement error)?<p>Please?

It wouldn't break current theory, it would just mean that photons travel slower than "speed of light" and have non-zero rest mass. Constant c in relativity instead of speed of photons would just mean fastest speed possible.

Some days ago I saw some people here saying that billions of dollars was wasted in LHC. I would like to know their opinion about new findings.<p>The post in question <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2943950" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2943950</a> .

Just for reference Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity - does not strictly prohibit the existence of particles that travel faster than the speed of light, it only prohibits acceleration in an inertial frame to reach the speed of light :<p>As per Wikipedia ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light</a> )<p>"In special relativity, while it is impossible in an inertial frame to accelerate an object to the speed of light, or for a massive object to move at the speed of light, it is not impossible for an object to exist which always moves faster than light."

Is it Bbc's policy not to capitalize acronyms? It's CERN, not Cern, and they did it multiple times.

discussion by people who actually know stuff: <a href="http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/can-neutrinos-be-superluminal/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/can-neutrinos-be-superlumin...</a>

If I calculated correctly, that's only about .0025% faster than c. Practical implications?

Headline is wrong - this experiment has nothing to do with the LHC

Phil Plait puts this into perspective:<p><a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/faster-than-light-travel-discovered-slow-down-folks/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/fa...</a>

The paper is now up: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897</a>

Considering that neutrinos can pass through a light year of solid lead unimpeded[0], they must face a lot of challenges in determining when a neutrino has been generated and when they are finally able to detect one arriving at its destination.<p>[0] <a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/neutrino3.html" rel="nofollow">http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/neutrin...</a>

Wow..... this is capital news! There is a flaw in our whole comprehension of physics and our basic understanding of everything that surrounds us. There might be faster that the fastest we have ever imagined and based our calculations on.<p>Yet, we see news like "Kardashian hubby's bad first impression" on the first page of sites like Yahoo "news", disappointing...

Bearing in mind 'spooky action at a distance', shouldn't we be expecting to see some kind of mechanism that would imply some kind of particle accounting behind the scenes, that might appear as objects or information moving faster than the speed of light?

Old CERN publication from 1998 suggesting that neutrinos could travel faster than c <a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/340078/files/9712265.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/340078/files/9712265.pdf</a>

"...the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner..."<p>I am impressed that their measuring instruments have a precision that is (statistically significant-ly) smaller than a billionth of a second.

The most striking thing that came across to me in the report is that the time difference is 60ns thereabouts!<p>Thats a whole lot of time delay, not a "tiny fraction" as the reports say. Light travels about 18m (~60 feet) in that time. A modern cpu will have processed more than 100 instructions in that time interval. So you don't actually need a CERN quality clock to measure it.<p>So if this turns out to be due to systematic errors of various kinds, I'm wondering what <i>other</i> measurements from the lab will be cast into doubt as a consequence!<p>Exciting result and possibly exciting times ahead for physics.

This seems to be somewhat related: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varying_speed_of_light" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varying_speed_of_light</a><p>"The variable speed of light (VSL) concept states that the speed of light in a vacuum, usually denoted by c, may not be constant in most cases."<p>"In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was much higher in the early universe, of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value."

<i>But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".</i><p>is it <i>really</i> crazier than nothing being able to travel faster than light? it sure as hell isn't crazier than particles flitting into and out of existence at the subatomic level all the time. the fact is, that most things science has uncovered, particularly in the last 100 years, have been nothing short of hysterical. and for this, dear researchers, i thank you.

Ok. Call off SETI until we master neutrinos for communication.<p>They pass through matter as it wasn't there AND could be faster than light? Aliens must have been stupid to use radio waves.

Taking a different point of view, perhaps there's nothing superluminal about this: what if the neutrinos are indeed travelling at 'true' c, whereas light is 'tiring out' over the same distance? (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light</a>)<p>The idea of cosmological redshifts would need revision, and thus our understanding of the universe. But at least c remains unassailable...

Why does the link title claim that the result is at the LHC? The LHC is not involved in this story at all.<p>Edit: other than the obvious reason of "linkbait", I mean.

Tesla postulated that there are faster speeds than light-speed... so he might have been right after all.<p>Or maybe he was just thinking of ludicrous speed.

Lol maybe the speed limit is marked by the neutrinos not by the light... By now... It will be interesting to see how this developes.

The research preprint is now available: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897</a>

How does one "fire a bean from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy"??

I wonder how accurate their time measurements are. If nothing can exceed the speed of light, what makes them think they can rig together hardware that will accurately measure speed at that magnitude?

I'm very skeptical about this. It seems like every time a "supposed" scientific discovery gets published in the media before a peer-reviewed journal, it's almost always wrong. The same thing happened with cold fusion, Ida (aka. Darwinius) the supposed "missing link" between human and ape, and NASA's "supposed" discovery of bacterium growth through arsenic instead of phosphorus.<p>It's always disheartening when science gets reported to the media at such an early age of discovery (i.e. the point where it hasn't been criticised and the lead investigator himself says he isn't so sure). It just opens the flood gates for the retarded news to make of moronic headlines like: "Roll over Einstein: Law of physics challenged"

I'm extremely ignorant when it comes to physics, but I hope it's for real. Maybe a big science breakthrough would interest people enough to start investing more in education.

As an aside, I just finished reading Walter Issacsons - Einstein biography.<p>Easily the best biography I have ever read. If you don't like biographys, this will change your mind.

I wonder how they accelerated uncharged particles.

xkcd on this piece of news, spot on as usual:<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/955/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/955/</a>

<a href="http://i.imgur.com/lZyY0.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/lZyY0.png</a>

Keep in mind that given that they said a few billionths of a second that the adjustment to c would be on the order of:<p><pre><code> (5 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c) = 0.000204776269 percent </code></pre> update: AP says it's 60 nanoseconds so<p><pre><code> (60 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c) = 0.00245731523 percent </code></pre> Also in different units:<p><pre><code> ((60 nanoseconds) / ((732 km) / c)) * c = 16 479.1646 miles per hour </code></pre> Interestingly, the earth moves about 60,000 miles per hour in relation to the sun, could this be explained by frame dragging / Gravomagnetism? This is pure speculation only because the numbers are with in the same order of magnitude.

Even if the neutrinos arrived faster than light could travel (that distance), it does not mean the neutrinos traveled that fast, only that far...<p>For example: when muon-neutrinos transform into tau-neutrinos, in that moment they could "tunnel" through space-time in some fashion that appears as faster-than-light travel. Or something happens to their probability waves to make them go from existing at point A, to point B.

54% in this random ass poll say "No way (e = mc^2)" <a href="http://www.wepolls.com/p/2879014/Do-you-think-scientists-at-Cern-have-really-broken-the-speed-of-light" rel="nofollow">http://www.wepolls.com/p/2879014/Do-you-think-scientists-at-...</a>

Couldn't it be that the lack of interaction with the electro-weak force allows neutrinos to exceed the speed of a photon in a non-vacuum environment? Or is the article saying that the neutrinos exceed <i>c</i>?<p>edit: More questions, since photons are massless they should be unaffected by gravity except in the sense of following the curvature of spacetime. Could the non-zero mass of the neutrino mean that if you changed the experiment so it fired away from the earth mean that the neutrinos would travel "slower" than photons?

"And of course the consequences can be very serious."<p>Understatement of the century.

Well Hellen Blavatsky was right after all; Science must finnally accept not just the existence of matter but of Spirit as well.<p>Besides scientific calculation of speed is based on the assumption that the velocities of transmission of all the colors are the same. Namely, if we call "W" length of the wave of any given color in ether, and "V" the velocity of transmission of that color, and "N" number of vibrations or waves of that color per unit of time, then the formula connecting these is W = V/N. But in order to calculate the rates of vibration Science assumes that the various Vs of the different colors are all equal to one another. This assumption is false and it has been proven that the velocity of red and of blue light are different.This is an important phase in human History-If this is true then the age of the Stars has Just Began.

Does this mean I have to buy a new textbook! BUT they are so expensive!!!

We're witnessing an increased vibrational rate of photons; it is, for those who are ready, a beginning of a higher density experience.

I bet Fox News and the Republican Party leadership in general are going to somehow spin this into their anti-climate-change, anti-science, anti-intellectual, pro-religion messaging.