Holy shit we broke the light speed limit

Source

An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles traveling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

First sub-atomic particles, next will be regular atomic particles! Maybe in a few decades we'll have FTL-traveling spaceships! And Klingons! And Captain Kirk!

Seriously though, if this news is true, it's exciting stuff that gives me hope for the future.

That's pretty dang exciting.

This is about as exciting as when they announced that they successfully teleported beams of light- it's neat, but won't actually be used for anything neat until I'm long dead.

My.

God.

I hope that is true.

Is this the same machine that, supposedly, was to create a black hole and kill us all?

I have to agree. Pretty exiting stuff.

That is awesome. FTL drives are next

call me again when we manage make a rocket go at least 1/4 of light speed. Until then, not interested.

How smug do you reckon that sub-atomic particle is right now?

Don't get too excited. 
 
Here's the paper. 
 

Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the

analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in

order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed

anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of

the results.  

 
They seem to be asking for someone to figure out what they did wrong.
 
And xkcd took it on today.

@ohnobruno said:

Don't get too excited. Here's the paper.

Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the

analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in

order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed

anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of

the results.

They seem to be asking for someone to figure out what they did wrong.

And xkcd took it on today.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20957-dimensionhop-may-allow-neutrinos-to-cheat-light-speed.html

For instance, although the detectors in Italy can pinpoint the neutrinos' time of arrival to within nanoseconds, it's less clear when they left the accelerator at CERN. The neutrinos are produced by slamming protons into a bar-shaped target, sparking a cascade of subatomic particles. If the neutrinos were produced at one end of the bar rather than the other, it could obscure their time of flight.

I think it is far more likely a measurement error but if this is true some shits gonna get fucked up.

First teleportation, now FTL...our Star Trek future is becoming reality. Now science needs to find us some green alien babes for the sexin'.

@ohnobruno said:

They seem to be asking for someone to figure out what they did wrong.

And xkcd took it on today.

Ah xkcd, continuing to be not funny.

I never really understood why just because light naturally travels at a certain speed, that nothing could possibly top it. My old physics teacher totally owes me $5.

And thus begins the end of the world. The end will come by space monkeys.

@ohnobruno said:

Don't get too excited. Here's the paper.

Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the

analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in

order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed

anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of

the results.

They seem to be asking for someone to figure out what they did wrong.

And xkcd took it on today.

Trying to find out what they did wrong is what scientists do. They assume their findings are a mistake until they are very sure it cannot be. That said even if they are correct it won't change anything, or not for a long time anyway.

Let's wait for the peer review before making any rash conclusions. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

@Shadow: Because according to Einsteins theory when you go faster than the speed of light you have infinite mass which is impossible. But hey maybe he was wrong.

If this is true everything that we've accepted about physics for the past 50 or so years will have to be looked at again and it will completely flip it upside down.

I mean I doubt that we'll ever be able to physically move a massive object like a starship faster than light due to the amount of energy required, but the fact that any object with mass can move faster than light is pretty damn cool. That's just something that I was taught was absolutely impossible. It would violate the laws of physics. And here we are with particles that can do just that and black holes that fundamentally violate the laws of physics, but they must follow some constant that we clearly don't understand otherwise they wouldn't exist. We're to stupid for our own good.

I still think that it's most likely an incorrect reading, anomaly, or something else though. At least until new evidence is put forth and it's stated as a fact.

I don't care! Why aren't they working on a way to transfer human consciousnesses into a robot so that I may live forever as a metal KING!?

I'm gonna go ahead and join the camp that will still claim that nothing travels faster than light, right... now! Nothing travels faster than light!

If it turns out to be true it will turn theoretical physics completely on its head. But, the instrumentation and experimentation techniques need to be put under a lot of scrutiny before it is accepted. At the moment they're basically saying to the science community "we don't believe this either, look at our data and find out where we went wrong". I hope it's true. I'd love for there to be a big shake up in the physics community, but I'm very sceptical.

We're gonna Gordon Freeman for this one.

@Peanut said:

I don't care! Why aren't they working on a way to transfer human consciousnesses into a robot so that I may live forever as a metal KING!?

There are many scientists who have that aspiration and many are working on it right now but our abilities are far from that. Anyways, the folks are CERN are investigating the deepest questions of life and finding out more about the core particles that make essentially, everything.

The only really interesting part of this is that it calls the most famous theory in the world into question.

Fucking Einstein was just a lunatic after all, I knew it.

I thought they said they tried to replicate it 1000 times or so and haven't been able to get the same results (at least that's what the report said on tv). It might be a measurement error.

MY WORLD IS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN!

I need to go find my astronomy teacher who kept insisting it was impossible to break the speed of light.

This could be neat, but, really, I won't be surprised if it turns out that something got screwed up. That is what I like about scientists though, even they don't believe their crazy shit when it happens. But it would be neat to have something crazy like this happen in the science world.

@Jimbo said:

How smug do you reckon that sub-atomic particle is right now?

It's probably the hipster of neutrinos. "I was traveling before there was light. I traveled faster than light before it was cool."

@JCTango: Been following this pretty close since last night, they just noticed the anomaly, when they looked back at their old data, the same thing has been present for years, they just weren't looking at that specifically so they never saw it.

Chances are it is something wrong with the experiment or the instrumentation that CERN cant figure out, but still keep this in mind: CERN noticed this months ago. They have been doing nothing but diagnostics on the equipment and checking the procedure since then to see if it was broken, and they can't find anything. I'm not saying this is definitely true, just that there's a non zero chance it could be.

And thus begins the end of the world. The end will come by space hamsters.

Does this mean time travel isn't necessarily impossible? Yeesh.

@XII_Sniper said:

Does this mean time travel isn't necessarily impossible? Yeesh.

If it is true, I'd want teleportation :). BAMF!

@theguy said:

@Shadow: Because according to Einsteins theory when you go faster than the speed of light you have infinite mass which is impossible. But hey maybe he was wrong.

but why does that make sense? Other than "because Einstein said so", I've never seen a reason why nothing could travel faster other than no one having done it yet and associations that give examples, but not proof.

ICP was quoted as saying "Shiiiit, we TOLD YOU scientists fucking lie! Faster than light? Buuuuuulllshit. Ever see a pelican? It'll blow your minds, man..."

For a second there I though you were going to try to sell me nipple covers. I know it's weird. But I've experienced it.

This result was also seen at Fermilab (the MINOS experiment) in 2008, though their significance was only 1.8 sigma, i.e. not accurate enough to prove any claim about muon neutrinos being tachyons. The OPERA result claims 6 sigma significance, which, if the result is correct, is a very precise measurement.

Unfortunately, the experimental setup is so complicated that any number of oversights in the systematics could significantly reduce their accuracy. Hence, after months of internal diagnostics without finding an error, the team is now looking to the whole community for falsification of their results. CERN gave a seminar talk today that was live-streamed, and the Q&A afterwards was quite intense; you could definitely tell that the team has examined many aspects of their setup for errors, as they had pretty solid answers to most of the questions raised.

And if the results are true? Well, given the amount of falsification that GR has survived in the past, the theory will not be thrown out in the cold. The physics community will not be "turned on its head" as harshly as some in the media seem to think. Granted, we'll have to redefine causality, though the Lorentz group allows for tachyons. In other words, the univerals speed limit will probably just increase.

And to think that all this excitement came from a side-project of an experiment designed to measure neutrino oscillations. Here's the ArXiv link if anyone's interested in trying to understand OPERA's experimental setup.

@Shadow said:

@theguy said:

@Shadow: Because according to Einsteins theory when you go faster than the speed of light you have infinite mass which is impossible. But hey maybe he was wrong.

but why does that make sense? Other than "because Einstein said so", I've never seen a reason why nothing could travel faster other than no one having done it yet and associations that give examples, but not proof.

It doesn't make sense because you don't understand all the other things that make sense that lead to it. The fact that you can't find oxygen on it's own doesn't make sense untill you understand electrons and bonding. It's been accepted for so long because it has always worked until now, as far as I know it hasn't been explicitly proven beyond theory but it's accepted because it explains what we know of the universe well.

I think people on both sides of the argument need to calm down. No, it hasn't been "proven" yet, but come on guys. Scientific "facts" have been proven wrong before. People used to think the world was flat. Science is always changing.

Phil Plait has a good breakdown of the necessary caution

@Peanut:

I don't understand why trans-humanists think that having consciousness transferred in such a way would amount to living forever. You would still die; you' would replace you with full memory, and anyone who knew you could still interact with you', but you would be completely unaware, as you're dead. It would be like making a sci-fi duplicate of yourself and one of you dies. While there's still a "you" floating around out there, the dead one is still dead and receives no benefit.

You' indicates the replication/replacement robot/computer/whatnot.

There are actually a few things we know about that  'appear '  to travel faster than C.  For instance, if two particles are entangled (Quantum Entanglement) then changing the spin of one particle will change the spin of the other instantly, no matter how far apart they are, even millions of light years apart. Of course, observing the spin of either particle will collapse the wave function so faster-than-light transfer of  information is still impossible with this method. 
 
And then there's just far out crazy shit like this. 

Lies! Nothing can travel faster than light.

@ohnobruno said:

They seem to be asking for someone to figure out what they did wrong.

And this is why I fucking love Science.

Just wait, Doc Brown... you'll have your moment in the sun soon enough.

We didn't break anything, if it holds up it just shows that the theory of relativity is flawed. This is likely as relativity can't explain why the subatomic world is so crazy.

@Scooper said:

@ohnobruno said:

They seem to be asking for someone to figure out what they did wrong.

And this is why I fucking love Science.

When the hell are we going to go to Mars!? 
The solution is there, haven't anyone played Mass Effect?

We didn't break anything, if it holds up it just shows that the theory of relativity is flawed. This is likely as relativity can't explain why the subatomic world is so crazy.