Neutrinos clocked traveling faster than light

[PPI Debra]

This is such a boggling discovery. It may change physics as we know it!

Neutrinos clocked moving at faster-than-light speed
CERN scientists ask for confirmation of discovery that could rewrite laws of nature


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44629271/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.Tnu90dRQUoM

By Frank Jordans and Seth Borenstein

GENEVA ? A pillar of physics ? that nothing can go faster than the speed of light ? appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein's theories.

Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. That's something that according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity ? the famous E (equals) mc2 equation ? just doesn't happen.

"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The organization, known as CERN, hosted part of the experiment, which is unrelated to the massive $10 billion Large Hadron Collider also located at the site.

Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.


"They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements," he said Thursday.

Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately.

"It's a shock," said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. "It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that ? if it's true."

The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance.

Other outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN's claim that the neutrinos ? one of the strangest well-known particles in physics ? were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second).


University of Maryland physics department Chairman Drew Baden called it "a flying carpet," something that was too fantastic to be believable.

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.

"We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement," said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA.

The researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.

A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN.

Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country's devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.

Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now."

He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar results weren't detected before.

"This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully," said Ellis.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[PPI Brian]

This is too cool. Where is the "like" button on these forums? 

[PPI Tim]

Sounds like a neutrinos could be called ghost particles. I wonder if they can effect humans when traveling through them.

[PPI Tracy]

This is too cool. Where is the "like" button on these forums? 

Here it is:

[LIKE]

[PPI Tim]

I was wondering if they could change the body's chemistry when passing through or genetically damage genes causing them to become cancerous. Wouldn't that be scary.

[PPI Karl]

Tim, I have this funny feeling that every time a neutrino flies through my brain, I get a cluster headache.

The implication of this discovery, if it stands up to peer review, is Nobel Prize-worthy.  Our entire understanding of the universe is based on the constant of light speed and that its speed cannot be surpassed.  This will rewrite physics across the board!  I'm totally flabbergasted and excited.

It also means, now, that there may be a chance for time travel and teleportation.  Seriously, in the vernacular of my students, "This sh*t's wikkid!"

[PPI Brian]

I agree; Faster Than Light travel is an incredible concept. The implications are enormous. But now it's time for other physicists to try to figure out if the measurements could have been wrong and to see if they can be reproduced. Let the peer review begin. 

[PPI Brian]

A new development in this fascinating story hit the news this morning:


Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

The phantom neutrinos of Opera are still eluding explanation.

Two months after scientists reported that they had clocked subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, to the astonishment and vocal disbelief of most of the world's physicists, the same group of scientists, known as Opera, said on Friday that it had performed a second experiment that confirmed its first results and eliminated a leading criticism of the first experiment.

But the group admitted that many questions remain. "This is not the end of the story," said Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern in Switzerland, spokesman for the collaboration.

Here's another article about the new findings:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396627,00.asp

Flaw in Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Experiment Ruled Out

Those "faster-than-light" neutrinos that turned out to be not as swift as scientists thought might just have received a needed boost to once again go zooming past Albert Einstein's long-standing upper limit on velocity in the universe.

Nothing's changed about the neutrinos, of course. But the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) researchers who shocked the world in September with a claim that they'd measured particles traveling faster than the speed of light now say a potential flaw in their experiment has been ruled out.

"New tests conducted at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of INFN by the OPERA Collaboration, with a specially set up neutrino beam from CERN, confirm so far the previous results on the measurement of the neutrino velocity," the INFN team said in a statement released Friday. "The new tests seem to exclude part of potential systematic effects that could have affected the original measurement."

In September, an international team of scientists led by Dr. Sergio Bertolucci reported that particles they had been firing for several years from the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland at detectors at the OPERA facility in Gran Sasso, Italy located about 450 miles away appeared to be arriving at their destination a fraction of a second earlier than the time it would take light to get there.

The particles, traveling through air, water, and rock, shouldn't have hit the Gran Sasso detectors any sooner than about 2.4 thousandths of a second after being fired, which is the time it would take light to travel the distance between the two points. Yet the CERN researchers reported that their neutrinos were getting to the target 64 nanoseconds faster?meaning that they were traveling faster than light, supposedly impossible according to Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

That news sent the scientific community into an uproar, spawned breathless headlines questioning whether E still equaled MC squared, and gave new hope to anyone who has dreamt of faster-than-light travel to distant stars and planets.

The report also kick-started a movement to show that the results were somehow flawed?in short, science started doing what it's supposed to do when surprising and potentially groundbreaking results are published.

Among the possible flaws in the OPERA team's experiment pointed out by other scientists was the absence of energy loss by the neutrinos, which a pair of Boston University physicists argued would be detectable if the particles had traveled faster than light. Other scientists questioned whether the team had correctly accounted for the effects of relativity on the GPS satellites they used to measure the amount of time it took for the neutrinos to travel from point A to point B in their experiment.

The INFN team set out to re-run the neutrino experiment late last month. While results are not yet conclusive, the team says it's now ruled out a possible error in the measurement of the starting time for the neutrinos as they were fired from an accelerator in Geneva to the OPERA facility in Switzerland.

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," said INFN president Fernando Ferroni. "The experiment OPERA, thanks to a specially adapted CERN beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

Jacques Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics of French CNRS, added that the team was re-checking other potential flaws in the original experiment.

"One of the eventual systematic errors is now out of the way, but the search is not over," Martino said. "There are more checks of systematics currently under discussion, one of them could be a synchronization of the time reference at CERN and Gran Sasso independently from the GPS."

[PPI Karl]

Wah-waaaaaah. (


Loose Cable Explains Faulty 'Faster-than-light' Neutrino Result
Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 22 February 2012 Time: 05:11 PM ET
           
Those famous neutrinos that appeared to travel faster than light in an Italian experiment last September probably did not do so after all. A faulty connection between a GPS receiver and a computer may be to blame for the mistake.

In September, and again in a repeat run in November, scientists on the OPERA team had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso Laboratory near Rome at what appeared to be a light-speed-shattering pace. The neutrinos completed the trip about 60 nanoseconds faster than a beam of light would have done.

Though the physicists felt confident in their experimental setup, they and the rest of the scientific community suspected that the shocking result was probably due to some error, considering that light as the universe's speed limit is a central tenet of Einstein's theory of special relativity.

And indeed, in November, another group of physicists also working at Gran Sasso Laboratory demonstrated that the neutrinos in question could not possibly have been traveling faster than light, because if they had, they would have given off a telltale type of radiation, which was not detected.

Further complicating matters, even the OPERA scientists couldn't yet explain why the neutrinos clocked in as fast as they did. Now, according to Science Insider, sources familiar with the OPERA experiment say a fiber optic cable connecting a GPS receiver and an electronic card in one of the lab computers was discovered to be loose. (The GPS was used to synchronize the start and arrival times of the neutrinos).

Tightening the connection changed the time it took for data to travel the length of the fiber by 60 nanoseconds. Because this data processing time was subtracted from the overall time-of-flight in the neutrino experiment, the correction may explain the seemingly early arrival of the neutrinos. To confirm this hypothesis, the OPERA team will have to repeat their experiment with the fiber optic cable secured.

When OPERA announced their results in September, the physicist and TV presenter Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey voiced the incredulity of many in his field when he said that if the results "prove to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV." It looks as if he, for one, has been spared that level of embarrassment.

[PPI Jason]

I'm not surprised by the result, but I think it's definitely a credit to the scientific community that the error was resolved. I think of a number of instances in the past where and error (or even fraud as in the case of Piltdown Man) in a scientific experiment perpetuated a falsehood in the scientific community that lasted decades and even centuries. These kinds of experiments are immensely complex and, as an individual who knows how tiny details in software can cause big problems, I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to track down this loose wire.

They probably had people going through computer code (maybe even at the bit level) examining everything down to the bolts in the chairs the scientists were sitting on looking for what could have caused the anomaly. I'm disappointed there wasn't a scientific breakthrough, but I'm glad for the care and dedication that was applied to the analysis.