Einstein is rolling over in His Grave, or Cern makes a big mistake

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I think creationists (the ones of the I-hate-science order) can take a lot from this, in the event they actually read even a smidgen about it. This is physics shattering stuff here, and the founders WANT someone to prove it wrong. Were the results not published until something like 6 months after the discovery? And only then were they published with the intention of having physicists the world over replicate it? This discovery speaks volumes to the nature of science.

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That is absolutely true. I think they would not be surprised at all if someone found out where they made a mistake. I think they are hoping it can be duplicated, since it is would be fun to be able to rename Einstein 'whirligig Einstein'

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that the proposed solution (a different inertial frame) is whoppingly insufficient to explain the order of magnitude of the measured neutrino's time-of-flight deviation from c (the speed of light).Consider: The relative speed of a GPS satellite (orbiting at 26,600 km from the center of the earth) vs the ground emitter & detector apparatus would be no more than 3410 meters per second. The associated relativistic length contraction of the distance between the emitter and detector (from 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)) would be no greater than 1 part in 1.6*10^10, which nets about 47 micrometers shorter over the 732 kilometers separation. The measured discrepancy (60 nanoseconds) corresponds to a difference of 18 meters, which is about 400,000 times (5 and a half orders of magnitude) of that which can be attributed to special relativity.Like I said, I may be missing something here.

Looks like we got a free thinker who wants to contradict the establishment of scientific doctrine. A group of geeky scientist ninjas have been dispatched to your house.

Well, it's the obvious sense-check to make - and you're quite right that the relevant gamma seems way too small to be the root cause of the discrepancy. If you look at his paper, his effect depends on v/c, not gamma, which explains how he gets the right order correction. But I have zero time to try to decipher his reasoning, especially as it means getting into the Opera paper (something I haven't even looked at yet given the same lack of time) At the moment, I'm far from convinced...

Doing so now; thanks for the reference! I was under the impression that GPS calculations are routinely pre-compensated for the effects (or at least first-order effects) of both general relativity and special relativity. According to Wikipedia, the probable cumulative uncompensated errors is on the order of 5 to 7 meters for civilian GPS, well within the 18 meter length-of-flight discrepancy. {A side note: Would CERN necessarily be limited to just civilian GPS, as opposed to double-checking with military GPS or alternative satellite positioning systems?}Anyway, the v/c method is clearly related to the restriction of one-way measurements of the speed of light, which itself is problematic in terms of synchronizing one's clocks. An obvious follow-up to rule out superluminal speeds (c + epsilon) would be to test neutrino time-of-flight in the opposite direction, which, if R. Elburg is correct, would (falsly) appear as sublight velocity of the same order of magnitude (namely, c - epsilon).

I share your skepticism about the GPS/frame of reference explanation for the FTL neutrino finding--not that I know anything about it.But I did see a summary of the original paper reporting the apparent FTL finding. It tells me that the two timing units were synchronized and calibrated at the Swiss Meterology Institute, then moved to CERN and LNGS. A third device was then set and moved back and forth to assure no discrepancy had developed.So the orbiting satellites relative to the departure and arrival locations appear to be irrelevant, so far as I can see. The timing was done at the sites with exquisitely calibrated devices, not with live GPS signals.

Sometimes one comes across a piece of writing so exceptional it almost makes one weep. I came to this article via Google News and didn't pay any attention to the source or the author. I clicked because I was interested in checking in on the latest news about the CERN neutrino experiment, so I began reading, fully expecting that within a minute or two I'd be on to the next Google News article.After a couple minutes I looked at the scroll bar and saw I was only a third of the way through the article. "Who is hosting such a long article?" I asked myself. Glancing at the top the page I saw it was Scientific American. Of course, who else?So I fetched a fresh cup of coffee and a snack and sat down to enjoy the rest of the article. About 2/3 of the way through I was so boggled by the clarity and quality that I had to know who wrote it. Turns out it was Tom Levenson, Professor of Scientific Writing at MIT.Those of you who feel like you haven't really understood the science will almost be convinced that you do. Those of you who believe you do understand the science (and at least a few of us are right) will receive the benefit of examples of explanations that seem like gifts from God.Read and weep: I’m Shocked! Shocked! to Find There Are Neutrinos Going On Here--Percy

And here we go again, Percy. Granted, the article by Tom Levenson is very well-written and is a testament to the scientific method helping to lead science to viable solutions to problems. All of this is not in question.It appears that Tom Levenson is yet another person who has (provisionally, to his credit) boarded the bandwagon proclaiming that Ronald A.J. van Elburg has offered the correct explanation of the observed neutrino time-of-flight discrepancy via special relativity. In doing this, he seemed to have leapt to the same initial misconception that I had:

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When one object is in motion, travelling in a different reference frame than some measuring apparatus, then special relativity comes into play. As the TechReview’s Physics ArXiv blog describes the issue, this means

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[that] from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite, the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing. From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter, says van Elburg.

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The correction needed to account for this relativistic shrinking of the path as seen from the point of view of the measuring device in space is almost exactly the same size as the seeming excess speed of the neutrinos the OPERA team believes they’ve detected. And that would mean that

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far from breaking Einstein’s theory of relatively, the faster-than-light measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it.

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  —Tom Levenson

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... namely, that relativistic length contraction of the path (as seen from the inertial frame of the orbiting GPS satellite) explains the discrepancy. This is not the case here, as can be easily checked as I have done in Message 47; but it seems to be becoming more widely accepted solely on the basis of the overall perceived weirdness of Einsteinian relativity by the general public. By uncritically using the Argument ad Einsteinum, Tom Levenson may have unwittingly contributed to the public confusion.From what I can gather, Elburg's explanation is actually based on the fact that (as seen from the frame of the moving satellite) the detector is moving towards the position that the emitter had (at the time of emission) during the time that the neutrino is in flight; look up Einstein's moving train gedankenexperiment for the basics.This first-order effect (due to the fact that the observed speed of light is the same in all inertial frames, leading to the observed assynchronity of two separated moving clocks which are synchronized in their own frame) is very easy to calculate without going into the second-order effects of relativistic length contraction. For any particle going at exactly the speed of light (including photons), this would account for about 30 nanoseconds, or approximately half of the measured discrepancy, assuming that this wasn't already somehow accounted for by CERN in the first place.

Hmmm - I didn't reach the same conclusion that he'd jumped onto that bandwagon: But even if he had gone all wild-eyed and giddy over the Elburg argument it wouldn't change how outstanding an article it is. From general descriptions about the nature of science to specific applications of science to areas like global warming, I just found it exceptionally exceptional.--Percy

Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same resultNow, things start to get really interesting.

What exactly are the ramifications if Albert Einstein is wrong and a particle can travel faster than c. Neutrinos could be zipping in and out of other dimensions or quantum tunneling through space time.
This must be what they are doing, because for a particle to travel fast as light or faster it in theory would have infinite energy right?

The new experiment only eliminates one possible error - admittedly one that seemed quite plausible. So it is still too early to conclude that neutrinos are travelling faster than light. Although it appears more likely now.Cavediver or Son Goku could probably tell you more. Your suggestions sound reasonable, but I do wonder if there are other possibilities. It would indeed take infinite energy to accelerate a particle with non-zero rest mass to c, if Special Relativity is true, so there must be some loophole and QM is a good place to look for it.

Not really. The whole "need infinite energy to go the speed of light" is rather misleading. Particles with well-defined rest mass travel slower than light. You can accelerate a particle to 99.9999% of the speed of light (as measured in the laboratory frame), but jump into the particle's frame and your back to stationary with respect to light. So which view is correct?The speed of light is not something that is a "bit faster" than a relativistic proton zipping around the LHC ring. It is something entirely different. You cannot hypothetically give a massive particle "infinite energy" and suddenly it hypothetically travels at c.Particles with zero rest-mass travel at c. And they cannot do otherwise.Particles that travel faster than c are tachyons, and they are a different beast again. They only exist superluminally: they cannot "slow-down" to c and then become subluminal; you do not need "infinite energy" to make a tachyon.If these neutrinos are tachyonic, they are created tachyonic. They are not created subluminal then accelerated to superluminal speed, a process which is utterly non-sensical as per the above explanation.So does it make sense for the neutrinos to be tachyonic? Not really. Tachyons as we understand them aren't really particles in the way we would normally understand the concept. Yet these neutrinos are acting like subluminal particles but appear to be travelling superluminally. That is problematic.The biggest problem is that if everything is as the experiment would have us believe, then much of the above explanation can be dismissed as it is based on an understanding that doesn't include this type of behaviour!! Yet we have the most accurate theories known to man based on these explanations. And we have previous neutrino studies that show no evidence of this tachyonic behaviour. So, inspite of the latest results, I remain highly skeptical. Possibly, but again we have never seen this behaviour before. And it is not the case that the neutrinos are passing through some exotic region of space-time. We may think that a mountain range, solid ground, and a reassuring 1G gravtational field are significantly different to empty space, but on the grand scale of the Universe, we're just a little barely-noticeable bump in the local space-time curavture...

Cavediver,Your post made me look up tachyons on wikidepidea, which made my head explode. Or did my head explode first? I suppose that depends on what information traveling in excess of c does to causaility!This is a question admittedly borne of ignorance, but could you put in layman's terms what a zero mass particle that exists in velocities exceeding c would mean for general and special relativity? What would the confirmation of the existance of such a particle mean in practical terms, for us social "science" types who don't have the background in mathematics or the phycial sciences to appreciate such concepts on paper? If any?Speaking hypothetically, if tomorrow it was determined that these particles, or any other, were confirmed to travel in excess of c (without tunneling through space/wormholes or whatever) what would the day to day consiquences be?Edited by Wollysaurus, : My own ignorance

For those of us who aren't particle physicists, I think we can put the immediate consequences at something a lot less than insignificant. What kind of thing are you expecting?