Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity may be wrong

[Tripsick]

"Particles recorded moving faster than light - CERN

GENEVA, Sept 22 | Thu Sep 22, 2011 12:42pm EDT
(Reuters) - An international team of scientists has recorded neutrino particles travelling faster than the speed of light, a spokesman for the researchers said on Thursday -- in what could be a challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics.
Antonio Ereditato, who works at the CERN particle physics centre on the Franco-Swiss border, told Reuters that measurements over three years showed the neutrinos moving 60 nanoseconds quicker than light over a distance of 730 km between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy.

"We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them," he said.

If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light."

Exciting times so it seems.

 

[igrowone]

interesting topic, who doesn't want to travel faster than light?
neutrino measurements aren't easy though, this will need plenty of corroboration

 

[Tripsick]

yeah i'm waiting for them to confirm this finding. i think there is a part of me that wants Einstein to be wrong so there maybe other possibilities of traveling faster than light.

I was reading in another forum that they use to say it was impossible to fly in heavier than air crafts and then it was impossible to travel faster than sound and so on.

 

[h^2 O]

I don't personally believe that faster-than-light speeds are not achievable. Mainly because of the huge distances in space - like if you were going the speed of light it would take 50,000 years to get to the other side of our galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. We'll figure it out sooner or later. Not sure if it will involve wormholes or what. A stargate looks promising.

 

[cocktail frank]

long space travels move alot faster when you bend the space time continuim.
pass right thru the wormhole

 

[supermanlives]

beem me up scotty

 

[headseed]

bean me up scotty

haha couldn't resist

this is pretty interesting stuff, can't wait for more findings to roll in

 

[bentom187]

very intresting,
id like to hear what they come up with .

 

[Phillthy]

very cool

 

[mugenbao]

It is interesting, and I'll be following the progress of the story, but I'm unconvinced. I dislike how such stories take on a life of their own before any peer review or scrutiny.

The Bad Astronomy blog has an interesting article on the subject, particularly dealing with possible inaccuracies of the measurement, for those who are interested.

Also worth reading is the ScienceNOW article.

However, even Ereditato says it's way too early to declare relativity wrong. "I would never say that," he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. "We are forced to say something," he says. "We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest." The results will be presented at a seminar tomorrow at CERN.

Still, it's an exciting story, and there will likely be much to learn from it. I find these kinds of things to be fascinating.

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[ShroomDr]

so they think that neutrinos arrived quicker than phontons would...

but 60ns is really hard to quantify given light travels ~300,000km/sec, and the possible inexactness of our measurements between the two given points...

 

[walt cunningham]

i think they first discovered this in 2007, but chalked it up to error.

so if this is true, what are the ramifications from this discovery, and will we see anything in our lifetime

 

[KSP]

 

[Marick23]

If you had a disc that was 1000 miles in diameter and spun the center of the disc at the speed of light wouldn't that edges of the disc be faster than the speed of light?

How can it be wrong if it's a theory?

 

[PorkSword]

I thought that ludicrous speed was already faster than light speed?

They've gone to plaid!

 

[Anti]

Too awesome. If FTL becomes available we could begin to colonize the galaxy.

To boldly go where no man has gone before...

 

[Gone Green]

Thanks, Tripsick.
I recently heard something about tachyons being faster than light, but didn't pursue it. Seeing this made me look it up and I learned they're theoretical particles.
I gotta come up for air more often...

 

[trichrider]

maybe that explains why light is a wave and a particle. the faster particles cause the wave...

...i'm just high, but this caught my attention.

 

[Anti]

I think it's pretty cool how they're so open to their experiment being independently verified. Science is cool.

"Wow. I certainly can't explain why I keep getting this result, but I certainly keep getting this result. I've spent years trying to make sense of it and I haven't the foggiest. Will you give it a go?"

Beats the crap out of "because I said so."

 

[oldbootz]

agreed anti, but i think that either there was a measurement error or the global speed limit is not exactly light speed. think of the global speed limit as an inverse square graph possibly? and some particles are small enough not to be affected by it as much? kind of like friction from the fabric of space-time while the object travels through it.