Speed of light 'broken': life changing scientific discoveries

[crimsonedge]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...scoveries.html

Ah, a very important part of the "Laws of physics" proven wrong. They are going to have to rethink quite a few many things. This is just one step in the riddle of unlocking interstellar travel.

[Mistral]

Aren't you an optimist. Yes, if the single experiment that returned this value can be verified and confirmed, it does represent a significant leap in our understanding of the universe. CERN had already contacted Fermilab and they're working up to test it as well. It will be interesting, especially if it does prove to be accurate.

Oh, and a more exhaustive story instead of just a basic "headline blurb" link with no real information can be found here.

EDIT: Though, just to be a wet blanket, don't expect interstellar travel anytime soon in either case. Neutrino's are the next best thing to massless, so their interactions have always been only weakly observed.

Particles break light-speed limit
Neutrino results challenge cornerstone of modern physics.
An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics — that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.

The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 metres underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. It is designed to study a beam of neutrinos coming from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory located 730 kilometres away near Geneva, Switzerland. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. But they are all around us — the Sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second.

The 1,800-tonne OPERA detector is a complex array of electronics and photographic emulsion plates, but the new result is simple — the neutrinos are arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light allows. "We are shocked," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and OPERA's spokesman.

Breaking the law

The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. If neutrinos are travelling faster than light speed, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of science — that the rules of physics are the same for all observers — would be invalidated. "If it's true, then it's truly extraordinary," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN.

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.

Reasonable doubt

If MINOS were to confirm OPERA's find, the consequences would be enormous. "If you give up the speed of light, then the construction of special relativity falls down," says Antonino Zichichi, a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. Zichichi speculates that the 'superluminal' neutrinos detected by OPERA could be slipping through extra dimensions in space, as predicted by theories such as string theory.

Ellis, however, remains sceptical. Many experiments have looked for particles travelling faster than light speed in the past and have come up empty-handed, he says. Most troubling for OPERA is a separate analysis of a pulse of neutrinos from a nearby supernova known as 1987a. If the speeds seen by OPERA were achievable by all neutrinos, then the pulse from the supernova would have shown up years earlier than the exploding star's flash of light; instead, they arrived within hours of each other. "It's difficult to reconcile with what OPERA is seeing," Ellis says.

Ereditato says that he welcomes scepticism from outsiders, but adds that the researchers have been unable to find any other explanation for their remarkable result. "Whenever you are in these conditions, then you have to go to the community," he says.

[crimsonedge]

Yeah of course this means we're gonna build a ship and be roaming the galaxy next Tuesday some time....

[Slacker Magician]

I've got a Stargate, spaceships are too slow .

[Sprung]

[Nemkoon]

I've got a Stargate, spaceships are too slow .

Quantum speed, yo.

[deadlegion]

Yeah of course this means we're gonna build a ship and be roaming the galaxy next Tuesday some time....

Spoiler warning:

[Andy_Jerk]

There will always be unsolved mysteries in the Universe. Knowing the answers to them all would be claustrophobic, and it is a blessing that an awareness contained within matter cannot comprehend the greater Arcana of intangibles.

[Dr Mario]

There will always be unsolved mysteries in the Universe. Knowing the answers to them all would be claustrophobic, and it is a blessing that an awareness contained within matter cannot comprehend the greater Arcana of intangibles.

Translation: I'm proud of my ignorance and wish everyone was as limited as me.

[Andy_Jerk]

The left hemisphere of the brain chisels away at meaningless factoids, attempting to set what is fluid into stone. Alas, it crumbles into nothingness. Dogmatic science has a calming effect on those who feel threatened by what cannot be quantified. Pray to your little formulas until they are proven false, then pretend you never believed in them at all.

[Aeolus Aeneas]

Science is not about belief, but what we can understand from facts. If that which we thought was true is proven to be false, we discard it and move on.

There is no dogma, only an eternal pursuit of truth that will always challenge something we hold as true at the moment.

[skullpoker]

We could be on Gleise581g in a little over 40 years if ion enginges can really accelerate to half the speed of light.

VASIMR rocket

[crimsonedge]

We could be on Gleise581g in a little over 40 years if ion enginges can really accelerate to half the speed of light.

VASIMR rocket

Reaching that speed is the easy part, surviving that speed would be the hard part, even a piece of space rock the size of a fist would destroy the ship no matter what material it was made out of. With current technology, even if you could reach half light speed eventually we got no means to deflect space rocks and debris that would destroy the ship. Concerns were expressed over this for a potential Mars mission, even when we were talking about speeds much, much lower, around 500k MPH.

[skullpoker]

So the satellite with the decayed orbit that was flying through the sky at 5 miles per second recently was not destroyed by orbital debris, and space shuttles have flown safely to the moon and back, but they won't make a 39 day trip to Mars.... I have no idea why not.

[Aeolus Aeneas]

Since when has a space shuttle flown to the Moon and back? I must have missed that.