LHC Can't Find the Higgs-Boson, But It CAN Find FTL Particles!

Liet · Oct 16, 2011

Speedy neutrino mystery likely solved, relativity safe after all

Those weird faster-than-light neutrinos that CERN thought they saw last month may have just gotten slowed down to a speed that'll keep them from completely destroying physics as we know it. In an ironic twist, the very theory that these neutrinos would have disproved may explain exactly what happened.

Back in September, physicists ran an experiment where they sent bunches of neutrinos from Switzerland to Italy and measured how long the particles took to make the trip. Over 15,000 experiments, the neutrinos consistently arrived about 60 nanoseconds early, which means 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Einstein's special theory of relativity says this should be impossible: nothing can travel faster than light.

The fact that the experiment gave the same result so many times suggested that one of two things was true: either the neutrinos really were speeding past light itself and heralding a new era of physics, or there was some fundamental flaw with the experiment, which was much more likely. It's now looking as though the faster-than-light result was a fundamental flaw, and appropriately enough, it's a flaw that actually helps to reinforce relativity rather than question it.

. . . .

The distance that the neutrinos had to travel in their reference frame is longer than the distance that the neutrinos had to travel in our reference frame, because in our reference frame, the detector was moving towards the source. In other words, the GPS clock is bang on the nose, but since the clock is in a different reference frame, you have to compensate for relativity if you're going to use it to make highly accurate measurements.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands went and crunched the numbers on how much relativity should have effected the experiment, and found that the correct compensation should be about 32 additional nanoseconds on each end, which neatly takes care of the 60 nanosecond speed boost that the neutrinos originally seemed to have. This all has to be peer-reviewed and confirmed, of course, but at least for now, it seems like the theory of relativity is not only safe, but confirmed once again.
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Fuck up found.

Lanzman · Oct 16, 2011

Science marches on!!

NAHTMMM · Oct 16, 2011

The people doing the experiment didn't factor that in? Wow. Maybe they just miscalculated initially?

The Exception · Oct 16, 2011

NAHTMMM said: ↑

The people doing the experiment didn't factor that in? Wow. Maybe they just miscalculated initially?
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They took into account relativistic effects between the two points, and each point and it's respective GPS satellite, but they didn't take into account relativistic effects between the two satellites.

Tuckerfan · Oct 16, 2011

In other news, the massive vibrations felt in the ground where Einstein's ashes were scattered, have ceased.

MikeH92467 · Oct 16, 2011

So I guess Charles Krauthammer shit his pants over nothing....
The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.

LINK

frontline · Oct 16, 2011

Thanks for the update but damn. This would have been all sorts of cool.

Paladin · Oct 16, 2011

It's what I expected, but I have to admit I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping there would be some radical new discovery...

Talkahuano · Oct 17, 2011

Hold your horses everyone! One of my friends has a physics degree and he's calling this guy's paper bunk!
He's got no references, no collaborators, and isn't even a physicist!

The neutrino issue is still unsolved!

Fisherman's Worf · Oct 17, 2011

Talkahuano said: ↑

Hold your horses everyone! One of my friends has a physics degree and he's calling this guy's paper bunk!
He's got no references, no collaborators, and isn't even a physicist!

The neutrino issue is still unsolved!
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Spoiler
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Lanzman said: ↑

Science marches on!!
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Ancalagon · Oct 17, 2011

Wow. Only took.... one month? for XKCD to be proven correct.

[xkcd=I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).]http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/neutrinos.png[/xkcd]

NOTE! This is how to properly post XKCD!

MikeH92467 · Oct 17, 2011

That is a great cartoon! I find this stuff fascinating even if I actually understand very little of it. Watching scientists call each other (in ever so polite language) incompetent douchebags who would have trouble doing long division if they couldn't take off their shoes is very entertaining. But seriously, I just don't know how anyone could say with a straight face that Einstein was going out the window if this finding couldn't be explained away. I mean we used Einstein (and Newton for that matter) to send men to the moon, so it's not like he was "wrong". At worst his theory would have been shown as incomplete.

Bailey · Oct 19, 2011

This entire situation is a great case study to point people to of how peer review works.

MikeH92467 · Oct 19, 2011

Bailey said: ↑

This entire situation is a great case study to point people to of how peer review works.
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I agree. It looks to me like this one went right by the book.

BearTM · Oct 21, 2011

Bailey said: ↑

Dan Leach said: ↑

The Beeb have an interview with Brian Cox, he brings up some interesting points.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034852

One thing that could be happening is the Neutrinos could be taking shortcuts through other dimensions, therefore not actually breaking the speed of light.

I kind of hope this one does end up being true, its going to throw everything up into the air if it does.
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From what I understand any kind of solution that uses alternate dimensions etc is still a problem because it still allows causality to be violated.
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Causality is only violated when the travel time between two points is less than zero. If T is equal to or greater than zero, then causality is preserved.

Marso · Oct 21, 2011

Paladin said: ↑

It's what I expected, but I have to admit I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping there would be some radical new discovery...
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Me too. It appears Einstein is still the roadblock to FTL.

Bailey · Oct 22, 2011

BearTM said: ↑

Bailey said: ↑

Dan Leach said: ↑

The Beeb have an interview with Brian Cox, he brings up some interesting points.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034852

One thing that could be happening is the Neutrinos could be taking shortcuts through other dimensions, therefore not actually breaking the speed of light.

I kind of hope this one does end up being true, its going to throw everything up into the air if it does.
Click to expand...

From what I understand any kind of solution that uses alternate dimensions etc is still a problem because it still allows causality to be violated.
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Causality is only violated when the travel time between two points is less than zero. If T is equal to or greater than zero, then causality is preserved.
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Conventionally, yes. However in terms of relativity where C is assumed to be the speed constant of the universe (essentially the "speed of reality") you have to take into account the fact that different reference frames are equally valid. Take the sun for example, while we typically understand that its light takes 8 minutes to reach us, relativity means that for all intents and purposes we can treat that as being how the sun is right now, since no effects can reach us faster than C. So if some activity on the sun could cause particles to reach us faster than C they would arrive from some viewpoints before their cause.

Tuckerfan · Oct 29, 2011

If at first you don't exceed, try, try, try again.

Scientists who announced that sub-atomic particles might be able to travel faster than light are to rerun their experiment in a different way.

This will address criticisms and allow the physicists to shore up their analysis as much as possible before submitting it for publication.

Dr Sergio Bertolucci said it was vital not to "fool around" given the staggering implications of the result.

So they are doing all they can to rule out more pedestrian explanations.

Physicists working on the Opera experiment announced the perplexing findings last month.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern (the home of the Large Hadron Collider) in Geneva toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second earlier than light would have.

The speed of light is widely regarded as the Universe's ultimate velocity limit. Outlined first by James Clerk Maxwell and then by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity, much of modern physics relies on the idea that nothing can travel faster than light.

For many, the most comforting explanation is that some repeated "systematic error" has so far eluded the experimenters.

Since September, more than 80 scientific papers about the finding have been posted to the arXiv pre-print server. Most propose theoretical solutions for the observation; a few claim to find problems.

Dr Bertolucci, the director of research at Cern, told BBC News: "In the last few days we have started to send a different time structure of the beam to Gran Sasso.

"This will allow Opera to repeat the measurement, removing some of the possible systematics."

The neutrinos that emerge at Gran Sasso start off as a beam of proton particles at Cern. Through a series of complex interactions, neutrino particles are generated from this beam and stream through the Earth's crust to Italy.

Originally, Cern fired the protons in a long pulse lasting 10 microseconds (10 millionths of a second).

The neutrinos showed up 60 nanoseconds (60 billionths of a second) earlier than light would have over the same distance.

However, the time measurement is not direct; the researchers cannot know how long it took an individual neutrino to travel from Switzerland to Italy.

Instead, the measurement must be performed statistically: the scientists superimpose the neutrinos' "arrival times" on the protons' "departure times", over and over again and taking an average.

But some physicists say that any wrong assumptions made when relating these data sets could produce a misleading result.

This should be addressed by the new measurements, in which protons are sent in a series of short bursts - lasting just one or two nanoseconds, thousands of times shorter - with a large gap (roughly 500 nanoseconds) in between each burst.

This system, says Dr Bertolucci, is more efficient: "For every neutrino event at Gran Sasso, you can connect it unambiguously with the batch of protons at Cern," he explained.
Clicking in

Physicist Matt Strassler, who raised concerns about the original methods, welcomed the new experimental design.

Writing on his blog, Prof Strassler, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, said: "It's like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn; in the latter case you have to figure out exactly when the horn starts and stops, but in the former you just hear each click and then it's already over."

The re-jigged neutrino run will end in November, when Cern has to switch from accelerating protons to accelerating lead ions. Opera scientists hope to include these measurements in the manuscript they will submit for publication in a scientific journal.

One of the main challenges to the collaboration's work comes from Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and his Boston University colleague Andrew Cohen.

In a recent paper, the physicists argue that if neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, they would rapidly lose energy, depleting the beam of more energetic particles. This phenomenon was not seen by the Opera experiment.
Cross checks

Dr Bertolucci called this study "elegant", but added: "An experimentalist has to prove that a measurement is either right or wrong. If you interpret every new measurement with older theories, you will never get a new theory.

"More than a century ago, Michelson and Morley measured the speed of light in the direction Earth was moving and in the opposite direction. They found the speed was equal in both directions."

This result helped to spur the development of the radical new theory of special relativity.

"If they had interpreted it using classical, Newtonian theory they would never have published," said Dr Bertolucci.

Next year, teams working on two other Gran Sasso experiments - Borexino and Icarus - will begin independent cross-checks of Opera's results.

The US Minos experiment and Japan's T2K experiment will also test the observations. It is likely to be several months before they report back.
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Dan Leach · Nov 18, 2011

Uhhhhhhhhhhhh

Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result

The team behind the finding in September that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and found the same result.

If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.

Critics of the first report had said that the long bunches of neutrinos used could introduce an error into the test.

The new work, posted to the Arxiv repository, used much shorter bunches.

It has been submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community.

The experiments have been carried out by the Opera collaboration - short for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus.

It hinges on sending bunches of neutrinos created at the Cern facility (actually produced as decays within a long bunch of protons produced at Cern) through 730km of rock to a giant detector at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy.

The initial series of experiments, comprising 16,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrives 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance.

The idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum forms a cornerstone in physics - first laid out by James Clerk Maxwell and later incorporated into Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Initial analysis of the work by the wider scientific community argued that the relatively long bunches of neutrinos could introduce a significant error into the measurement.

Those bunches lasted 10 millionths of a second - 160 times longer than the discrepancy the team initially reported in the neutrinos' travel time.

To address that, scientists at Cern adjusted the way in which the proton beams were produced, resulting in bunches just three billionths of a second long, so the Opera collaboration could repeat the measurements.

'Profound implication'
The first announcement of evidently faster-than-light neutrinos caused a stir world-wide; the Opera collaboration is very aware of its implications if eventually proved correct.

The error in the length of the bunches, however, is just the largest among several potential sources of uncertainty in the measurement that must all now be addressed in turn; these mostly centre on the precise departure and arrival times of the bunches.

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," said Fernando Ferroni, president of Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics in a statement.

"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."

Those measurements may be much longer in coming, as only a few facilities worldwide have the detectors needed to catch the notoriously flighty neutrinos - which interact with matter so rarely as to have earned the nickname "ghost particles".

Next year, teams working on two other experiments at Gran Sasso experiments - Borexino and Icarus - will begin independent cross-checks of Opera's results.

The US Minos experiment and Japan's T2K experiment will also test the observations. It is likely to be several months before they report back.
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Still not resolved, I almost get the impression they will keep running this until it turns up the right answer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

MikeH92467 · Nov 18, 2011

^^^In effect that's exactly what they are doing and what they should be doing IMHO. If you're going to overturn one of the most universally accepted tenets of modern physics as we currently understand how could it be otherwise? Or as Carl Sagan put it "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" Actually it's going to be quite amusing to see how scientists reconcile the fact that while one of the things they thought they knew about physics was wrong while at the same time so many calculations based on that same understanding have turned out to be correct.

Lanzman · Nov 18, 2011

Bickendan · Nov 19, 2011

I, for one, welcome our FTL neutrino overlords.

Demiurge · Nov 19, 2011

I tried to, but I couldn't see them, they were moving so fast they traveled backward in time.

Marso · Nov 19, 2011

MikeH92467 said: ↑

^^^In effect that's exactly what they are doing and what they should be doing IMHO. If you're going to overturn one of the most universally accepted tenets of modern physics as we currently understand how could it be otherwise? Or as Carl Sagan put it "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" Actually it's going to be quite amusing to see how scientists reconcile the fact that while one of the things they thought they knew about physics was wrong while at the same time so many calculations based on that same understanding have turned out to be correct.
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The same way calculations performed on the macro scale using Newtonian mechanics still hold true within their proper scale.

MikeH92467 · Nov 19, 2011

Marso said: ↑

MikeH92467 said: ↑

^^^In effect that's exactly what they are doing and what they should be doing IMHO. If you're going to overturn one of the most universally accepted tenets of modern physics as we currently understand how could it be otherwise? Or as Carl Sagan put it "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" Actually it's going to be quite amusing to see how scientists reconcile the fact that while one of the things they thought they knew about physics was wrong while at the same time so many calculations based on that same understanding have turned out to be correct.
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The same way calculations performed on the macro scale using Newtonian mechanics still hold true within their proper scale.
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Exactly the way I see it. It is always amusing when something in science that was thought to be the last word, turns out not to be. As I've said before, this wouldn't show that Einstein was wrong, just that his theory was incomplete. Did anyone else read Charles Krauthammer's column about how this would overturn physics as we knew it? I was thinking "this guy shits his pants way too easily"...

Dan Leach · Feb 22, 2012

BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results

It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.

Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/breaking-news-error-undoes-faster.html

Looks like I got to this one first

Tex · Feb 22, 2012

Dan Leach said: ↑

Looks like I got to this one first
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Tex said:

17 billionths of a second may be the time it take from the button press (or whatever) for the signal to be sent to the computer that is timing it and for the computer to start the timing. Perhaps on the receiving end when the neutrinos arrive there is a shorter distance for the signal to travel to stop the timer so the result is the slight delay on the front end but almost none on the back end, thus making them appear to arrive faster than they should. Rather than faster than light they might be moving exactly at light speed or only very slightly slower.
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Or did you? Post #7, Tex beats all those eggheads to the explanation by several month. You're welcome, science.

Forbin · Feb 27, 2012

Tuckerfan · Mar 16, 2012

And can somebody make up their mind about those damned neutrinos?

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible "effects" may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector's master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos' flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA's particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show.
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Ward · Mar 30, 2012

Fallout

The Italian professor who challenged Einstein’s famous theory of relatively, leading an experiment that appeared to show tiny particles moving faster than the speed of light, has resigned from his post.

Antonio Ereditato stepped down as coordinator of the OPERA experiment at Italy’s national institute of physics on Friday, Reuters reported.

The INFN -- the National Institute of Nuclear Physics -- had no comment beyond saying it "took note" of his decision. It was not immediately possible to reach Ereditato for a comment, Reuters said.

Einstein theorized that the speed of light in a vacuum -- approximately 186,280 miles per second, or about 700 million miles per hour -- is an absolute speed limit, and used the value in his famous formula, E = mc2.

The theory that some tiny bits of matter were whizzing along faster than Einstein thought possible was announced in Sept. 2011, when physicists with the CERN lab in Switzerland said they observed neutrinos completing a 454-mile racecourse faster than a beam of light would.

When announcing their follow-up finding in November, scientists at INFN said that their tests were intended to exclude one potential effect that may have affected the original measurement.

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the INFN.

Apparently, yet more scrutiny was required.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva confirmed in mid-March that colleagues from their rival team were a little hasty with their announcement.

"The evidence is beginning to point toward the OPERA [rival team] result being an artifact of the measurement," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said March 16. The OPERA team already admitted rather sheepishly last month that a malfunctioning cable may have been responsible for their astonishing claim that some particles may be able to travel faster than light speed.
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LHC Can't Find the Higgs-Boson, But It CAN Find FTL Particles!

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LHC Can't Find the Higgs-Boson, But It CAN Find FTL Particles!

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