On hadron colliders, dark matter and black holes

[waldronate]

It's all Greek to me, heh heh.

There are some Arabic numerals in there as well as a touch of Latin...

[torstan]

A quick note on some interesting results appearing in the news today:

The OPERA experiment may have observed neutrinos going faster than the speed of light. They've seen them arrive 60ns (+/-10ns) earlier than they would have at the speed of light. That variation is on an expected time of 2.4ms or so. So it's a variation of 2 billionths. They claim enough statistics and error control to be looking for cross-checks and ideally independent verification.

Here's the AP story - it's a lot better than the BBC one this time round.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

The comment from John Ellis about the neutrinos from the 1987 supernova are particularly worth noticing. A quick estimate says that if the same phenomena were true for those neutrinos then the neutrinos would have arrived 1/3 of a year before the light (the neutrinos were actually detected 3 hours before the light - for well understood reasons). The neutrinos in that case will have had different energies, but it's a good cross-check that will have to be explained.

Here's a quote from the spokesperson for the OPERA collaboration:
"we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy" - from the BBC article.

So they are not claiming a result yet. Exciting times - and it would be amazing if this were true.

[Ascension]

One question I don't know the answer to since I'm not in the physics field (and did poorly in it in college 23 years ago), do neutrinos have mass?

[torstan]

23 years ago the answer would have been - we don't know. Now we can say they do, but it's incredibly small - less than 1 billionth of the proton mass. But yes, they shouldn't be able to go at the speed of light, let alone over it.

[ravells]

Just spotted on boing boing an article which says they've found particles which can travel FTL?

[torstan]

See three posts up

[Djekspek]

Hmm, I always found Einsteins statement that the best prove that back-in-time-travel is impossible, is the fact that we haven't met anyone from the future yet... (it was him right?) But hey, I'm no expert on this stuff (tried to read Hawkins' books, but this theoretical stuff is way beyond me). So, if this proves right, would this mean that we can actually travel back in time...?

[torstan]

Well as soon as you break the nothing faster than light limit most of relativity is called into question - so any theorems about not travelling back in time derived from it are pretty much up in the air. I'd say if this comes out true then all bets are off.

[Redrobes]

Whilst 60nS in 2.4mS is tiny, 60nS is quite a lot as an absolute value. Its like something that at a real push I might be able to make a rough timing of with some home brew circuits on the bench. Heck, a GPS can do 10x that accuracy. I.e. its not like people with a large physics lab could be mistaken by that amount. That's like light being there 60ft closer than it should have been. It will indeed be interesting to see what they find out as being the cause of this.

So I just want to check here. How do they know at the detector when the emitter sent them ? Would they use radio to transmit the sync pulse and assume that the radio pulse goes at c ?

I guess if it were easy it would be a good idea to do the same test halfway across the gap at the same time.

FTL - in my lifetime. No way man !!! Don't we need to get chummy with Vulcans or something for that ???

[cantab]

Hmm, I always found Einsteins statement that the best prove that back-in-time-travel is impossible, is the fact that we haven't met anyone from the future yet... (it was him right?)

The counter-argument is that a time machine can't take you back to before it was built.

There is in fact previous theory suggesting neutrinos could be tachyons - faster-than-light particles. Google tachyon neutrino and you should find a couple of papers. The existence of tachyons might not contradict General Relativity.