Scientists Baffled By Seemingly Faster-Than-Light Particles

[Madara XIII]

The laws of physics. Immutable until proven otherwise.

well this breaks the Special Theory of Relativity.

using the all encompassing "its only a Theory" argument makes me feel like a self satisfied smug idiot, I feel dirty.

This stream of tiny particles is tasked with passing through layers of rock, water and dirt, and by measuring the speed at which it reaches the Italian lab, researchers can get a better understanding of how physics works at the sub-atomic level.

Well that explains it!, Italians have a propensity for making things go fast

Exhibit A)

Spoiler

Have an a picture of a Ferrari at an exciting jaunty angle to prove my point!

Awww I thought you were gonna use the Mozzaratti as an example

 

[dave1004]

*sigh*. Since the dawn of mankind, we've always known the truth.

The fastest thing in the universe is, hands down, is Nyan Cat. Everybody knows that poptarts can fly!

Eeeeeverybody.

 

[Trippy Turtle]

Well I'm no physicist but if something had no mass (Black hole) and traveled faster then light then the mass wouldn't increase and it would just continue. Do these things have any mass?

EDIT: never mind.

Mass does NOT increase as your velocity approaches c. Rather, what changes is the relationship between momentum and energy (what you find is that the energy required to increase your momentum increases exponentially, as you approach c).

 

[Wyes]

Well I'm no physicist but if something had no mass (Black hole) and traveled faster then light then the mass wouldn't increase and it would just continue. Do these things have any mass?

Just for the record, black holes definitely have mass =P usually at least 10 times the mass of our Sun.

 

[Unas]

Nice to see the Escapist's reporting of this being both down to earth and having an amount of detail/information/explanation that shows confidence in the intelligence of their audience. Opposed to so many news channels going 'faster than light, when can I travel back in time, hurr durr."

The laws of physics. Immutable until proven otherwise.

The actual 'laws' of physics are. It's just that we don't have them down on paper 100% accurate quite yet.

 

[Trippy Turtle]

Well I'm no physicist but if something had no mass (Black hole) and traveled faster then light then the mass wouldn't increase and it would just continue. Do these things have any mass?

Just for the record, black holes definitely have mass =P usually at least 10 times the mass of our Sun.

I thought that black holes had infinite density but no mass. I really need to learn more about physics.

 

[Wyes]

Well I'm no physicist but if something had no mass (Black hole) and traveled faster then light then the mass wouldn't increase and it would just continue. Do these things have any mass?

Just for the record, black holes definitely have mass =P usually at least 10 times the mass of our Sun.

I thought that black holes had infinite density but no mass. I really need to learn more about physics.

Infinite density because it has no volume.
Two things to put you on the right track about this intuitively;
Firstly, without mass, you don't have gravity (directly from Newton's law of gravity, GMm/(r^2), or from General Relativity but I have to admit I don't know much about it).
Secondly, density is the amount of mass in a certain volume. Or, density = mass/volume. So if the mass is zero, the density is zero. However, as the volume approaches 0 (because we can't divide by zero, we don't know how to), the density goes off to infinity.

 

[Trippy Turtle]

Well I'm no physicist but if something had no mass (Black hole) and traveled faster then light then the mass wouldn't increase and it would just continue. Do these things have any mass?

Just for the record, black holes definitely have mass =P usually at least 10 times the mass of our Sun.

I thought that black holes had infinite density but no mass. I really need to learn more about physics.

Infinite density because it has no volume.
Two things to put you on the right track about this intuitively;
Firstly, without mass, you don't have gravity (directly from Newton's law of gravity, GMm/(r^2), or from General Relativity but I have to admit I don't know much about it).
Secondly, density is the amount of mass in a certain volume. Or, density = mass/volume. So if the mass is zero, the density is zero. However, as the volume approaches 0 (because we can't divide by zero, we don't know how to), the density goes off to infinity.

Oh yes it was volume not mass that was zero. Thank you. Wouldn't infinite density mean black holes would sink through everything?

 

[Wyes]

Well I'm no physicist but if something had no mass (Black hole) and traveled faster then light then the mass wouldn't increase and it would just continue. Do these things have any mass?

Just for the record, black holes definitely have mass =P usually at least 10 times the mass of our Sun.

I thought that black holes had infinite density but no mass. I really need to learn more about physics.

Infinite density because it has no volume.
Two things to put you on the right track about this intuitively;
Firstly, without mass, you don't have gravity (directly from Newton's law of gravity, GMm/(r^2), or from General Relativity but I have to admit I don't know much about it).
Secondly, density is the amount of mass in a certain volume. Or, density = mass/volume. So if the mass is zero, the density is zero. However, as the volume approaches 0 (because we can't divide by zero, we don't know how to), the density goes off to infinity.

Oh yes it was volume not mass that was zero. Thank you. Wouldn't infinite density mean black holes would sink through everything?

Given the kinds of tidal forces involved for anything to get that close to the singularity itself, I think it'd be a non-issue, as any matter that close would get torn apart. But if we ignore that for a minute and consider it just as some point mass, then probably yeah, it would just sink through anything (provided it had no charge), matter is mostly empty space (though it's possible it could collide with a nuclear or somesuch).

EDIT: Just occurred to me that you might've meant in terms of bouyancy, in which case yeah, it would, given the same conditions as before.

 

[Alar]

What the fuck? If this is true it will change a lot of things we thought we knew about not just physics, but everything in this universe. I so want this to be true. Faster than light, people. Fuckin' warp speed!

We just have to find out a way to create a closed neutrino-warp shell around our starships, and then we can use it to travel less than a percent faster than light speed! Get on it, Space Engineers!

 

[Dogstile]

Now I just cross my fingers and hope someone invents a FTL drive during my life time.
who is ready for some space travel?

Unfortunately, going that fast would certainly light you on fire.

 

[BrownGaijin]

First thought: So it got to Italy before it's light did? (rhetorical)
Second thought: I'm surprised no one has tried to write it a ticket.

 

[KnowYourOnion]

Eh, they have already theorized that particles exist that can go faster than the speed of light, and have been looking for "light booms", which is created when particles accelerate past the light "barrier" so to speak, like a sonic boom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon

A tachyon can't travel below the speed of light, it's a purely super-luminal particle (if they even exist at all). These are neutrinos which have never been observed to travel faster than the speed of light before. If your response to this is "eh" then you obviously don't understand how potentially huge this discovery could be.

 

[KnowYourOnion]

I've always called bullshit on matter being incapable of travelling faster than light. I'm certainly not any kind of scientist, but I got in an argument with my physics teacher in high school - it was a simple contradiction of facts that screwed the whole thing. We watched a doco about the Big Bang, and as they explained to expansion of the universe (from 'instant' 1 to year 3 billion or so).

Anyway, they explained the speed of the expansion of matter - and bingo.

The first fucking thing in the fucking universe was matter travelling faster than fucking light. Did every scientist in existence fail at logical deduction 101?

No they didn't, it's called Inflation Theory and it doesn't contradict General Relativity. You really expected that they would try telling you all the facts in a High School physics lesson? It's called Lies to Children so that wee folk can actually grasp some parts of physics without having to do complex maths.

All scientific evidence up until this point has been providing evidence that c is in fact the ultimate speed limit in the universe.

Stop trying to prove scientists wrong they do know what they are talking about.

 

[fulano]

I don't get it

I've always called bullshit on matter being incapable of travelling faster than light. I'm certainly not any kind of scientist, but I got in an argument with my physics teacher in high school - it was a simple contradiction of facts that screwed the whole thing. We watched a doco about the Big Bang, and as they explained to expansion of the universe (from 'instant' 1 to year 3 billion or so).

Anyway, they explained the speed of the expansion of matter - and bingo.

The first fucking thing in the fucking universe was matter travelling faster than fucking light. Did every scientist in existence fail at logical deduction 101?

No they didn't, it's called Inflation Theory and it doesn't contradict General Relativity. You really expected that they would try telling you all the facts in a High School physics lesson? It's called Lies to Children so that wee folk can actually grasp some parts of physics without having to do complex maths.

All scientific evidence up until this point has been providing evidence that c is in fact the ultimate speed limit in the universe.

Stop trying to prove scientists wrong they do know what they are talking about.

Good for calling him on it. That's the standard bad behavior of someone that has no idea what he/she is talking about but still wants to get into a hot topic on the same level of someone who has a specialization on the matter while doing zero amount of work.

It hardly surprises me how many people seem to be going on about how Einstein has been "proved wrong," or trying to throw fucking Tachyons into the soup, or overally saying that this is old hat, and other such nonsense.

The scientists themselves say that this is kind of a big deal and are wanting to broaden the experiment to see what's up. People saying Einstein was "wrong" are akin to those guys saying that Newton was "wrong" b/c his maths an dtheories didn't hold up to what we now know is the realm of Einstein's theory.

 

[LockeDown]

Of course, no one mentions the experiments done on Supernova 1987A, which was essentially the same experiment performed by OPERA over a much larger distance. In the case of the thirteen neutrinos that were triangulated back to 1987a (yes, I said thirteen neutrinos), they were all found to travel at speeds very close to the speed of light, but were not able to break the barrier. If they had, we would have found neutrinos from 1987a in the year 1953.

With these sorts of experiments, you have to remember that CERN and OPERA are using statistical models to generate meaningful statistics from their data, and that these models, no matter how well-crafted, can be inaccurate simply due to our technological limitations. I would not be surprised at all if, in a few weeks, it turns out these results all came from an error in statistics and measurement, rather than a failure on any of the research team's ability to understand physics.

 

[willsham45]

1. All science is made up of therorys. So basicly I think this is so staitments, ie does not have to be true.
2. Its not uncommon for there to be exceptions to the rules. I hated that is science, This is how this reacts in these conditions...unless of cause it is chemical a b or c in which case this happenes...
3. Do you really think an italian can be trusted with a stop watch
4. Does this mean it would be theoretically possable for faster than light speed travel in the future now?

 

[Cody Holden]

1. All science is made up of therorys. So basicly I think this is so staitments, ie does not have to be true.
2. Its not uncommon for there to be exceptions to the rules. I hated that is science, This is how this reacts in these conditions...unless of cause it is chemical a b or c in which case this happenes...
3. Do you really think an italian can be trusted with a stop watch
4. Does this mean it would be theoretically possable for faster than light speed travel in the future now?

1. A theory in science is something tested enough to generally be considered as close to fact as science is going to get.
2. The exceptions are only ever because of the rules you don't know about at the moment.
3. "Stop watch" and "gigantic particle accelerator surrounded by 50+ feet of measuring equipment on all sides at several points" are a far cry away from one another.
4. Well, it's always been possible to travel faster than light... If you're smaller than an electron.

THIS. FINDING. DOES. NOT. CANCEL. RELATIVITY.

All this theory does is verify the idea of quantum-sized particles being able to ignore relativity (which only ever applied in macro-physics anyways) and surpass the speed of light. Science has theorized the possibility for quite some time, we just hadn't managed to make it happen yet. Now we have. And nothing has really changed.

Honestly, I was much more impressed by the two-slit experiment (excuse the corniness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc ) when I heard about it. It has implications a lot more far-reaching and fascinating.