http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this.'"

Just saw this and came to SMP to post it. If confirmed this is probably the biggest scientific discovery in the modern world with such far reaching implications I can't even begin to imagine them.

Imagine how drastically your day to day life might change if we develop a way to send information faster than light?

headasplode.jpg

Doesn't that mean the information will arrive before I send it?

Here's one for wait and confirm.

Just what the internets need.

Would anti mass be able to travel faster than light?

I knew it. Nothing can travel AT the speed of light, but FTL travel was definitely possible.

I now will quietly twiddle my thumbs and wait for the engineers to crunch numbers and build the machines while I philosophize on metaphysics of this.

Does anyone have a good link to an explanation of this that is more than a news article, but less than a physics journal article?

I can think of one thing just off the top of my head.

Herp derp. Obviously I meant nothing OTHER than light. ldo

Also other massless particles such as the gauge boson.

Possible the distance measured is not the distance traveled?

Or, that the neutrinos are finding a path in some other continuum in which relativity does not hold?

From physics Reddit:

There was also something about a posting to arXiv afterwards.

It'll be pretty physics-y but might offer some insight.

Here is a link that may have anticipated this test result.

You do realize that the speeds they claim are only within 1 part in a million larger than light? Right? Light takes 2.5 msec to travel (and of course they have not used light to measure the distance EVER since its inside the earth crust and lower ) and they observe a faster signal by a few nano seconds or basically 1 part in 1 mil type difference. Lets see a true paper first that presents in amazing detail all their process of measurements and how the beam is constructed and how it is recorded (obviously you need to have localization of source and detection trace to less than 1m) and then start thinking systematic errors and of course eventually something more profound to explain it rather than ahah superlight speed. And of course you also have neutrino oscillation effects that may enter the problem and how it all comes together in terms of what is defined as measurement of the family type and how this related to oscillations from the solar ones etc.

I do expect in the future discrepancies will emerge but not in the way people imagine it as something like 2 times the speed of light or even 10% higher. It will more likely be a statement about the nature of geometry and its relation to QM.

Additionally i want to see how they calculate the true distance from one location to another 732km away when the observed difference is only within 0.1-1 meter in what they are observing.

Did hey take properly into account General Relativity bending of the path neutrinos follow? Did they properly account for gravitational time dilation etc?

How do they calculate the true distance? Lets see some details before the fanfare about super light speeds ...

Since we know FTL is possible, I wonder if gravity travels FTL...

ie. If the sun magically dissapeared, would the earth continue to orbit for another ~8 minutes? Or would the earth lose orbit instantaneously? Or somewhere in between...?

If all nuetrinos "travel faster then the speed of light" then it is confounding. If only some of the nuetrinos "travel faster then the speed of light" then I would suggest that perhaps the boys at LIGO have been scooped.

Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory

wow, that would be HUGE, but i suspect some kind of measurement error.

I also wonder how they take into account the rotation of earth lol (and that around the sun too why not although much smaller)! I mean the true distance traveled depends on the rotation as well. And the funny thing is that in the ~0.0024ms time of travel, earth is moving about order (sure enough depends on direction of the path traveled so trust only the order of magnitude) 0.0024ms*40000km/86400= surprise-surprise lol ~1m which is about the discrepancy seen already.

The neutrino beam has to aim, upon leaving the creation site, for the place the detector will be by then, not the true geometric distance at the time of the "emission" in a rigid non rotating frame. That is too elementary for them to have missed but its funny how its of the same order of magnitude as the speed violation and of course its reducing the distance as the beam travels against the rotation of earth (Geneva's CERN is north left of Italy's Grand Sasso ie in the northwestern direction maybe ~45 deg angle to the rotation speed vector) .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Sasso

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eu...s_map_en_2.png

http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/spip.php?rubrique41

For those of us whose physics knowledge doesn't go much beyond the discoveries of Newton, can someone explain the implication of this finding in somewhat understandable terms?

Was about to ask the same thing...certainly if proven it means that at some subatomic level the special theory of relativity does not hold in some certain cases.

What that means in practical real world terms, i have no idea. My undergrad physics class was titled "physics for poets" and promised "no math!".

saw this earlier on world news and was jaw dropped.

cant even imagine what this would mean to the current state of science and physics. eagerly awaiting more

Thanks for including location otherwise I wouldn`t have known if this was an epic level

so basically what some posit is that the neutrinos travel interdimensionally and are thus able to beat the cosmic speed limit. Imo thats the only theory that makes sense if they do indeed have mass. Is it pretty verified that they have a mass yeah? My only other theory was that they weigh less then nothing (all this assuming ofc results are true)