Calm yourself. They still have to do months more of testing in other labs in the US and Japan to verify it. But it could be a ground-breaking discovery in physics (and also completely falsify everything we know about it)

Excellent! Warp drive, here we come....

....except we can barely get out of the Well

If true, this would probably be the most important discovery in physics in at least 100 years.

I have a physics test tomorrow, I think I'll leave it blank and claim answers pending.

If this is true, it will have a lot of interesting implications.

Proof of intelligent design?

lol

I don't see how.

Because it shows that all science has are "theories" which are always shown to be wrong in the long run. Whereas the word of God is immutable.
I'm being cynical of course. But it wouldn't surprise me if this argument was used.

http://imgur.com/gallery/QjJyM

stratagos +0.00002

@abgemacht:Good news everyone!

I've been telling people for years that light speed is breakable. But did they listen? no! The question simply remains if we can safely send living tissue at those speeds. The acceleration alone to reach it in a reasonable time-frame would require first some form of inertial dampening.

Hearty congratulations to the team at Cern for being so brave and going where the experimental evidence took them (despite all the computational models to the contrary). So special relativity may be wrong, whatever next?

+1 Goldfinger, I'm sure we won't have any concrete idea of what the data actually is for some time... And when we do, I'm sure I won't really understand it.

From what I can remember of the relativity sections of university life, there was no part of the theory that said things can't move faster than the speed of light. It was pretty keen on saying things can't be accelerated past the speed of light, but that's not the same thing.

I'm going to have to read a little deeper into how they detected these neutrinos. These things are bloody hard to detect at the best of times, and there is plenty of room for a cock-up here. I dare say it's worth waiting for the CERN guys to look over their equipment with a fine tooth comb before getting too excited. Perhaps they should send a few of ESA's Astrophysicists to give it a go in the stead of CERN's gnome like partical physicists who frankly wouldn't know their arse from their elbow.

Octavious, you are wrong.

The theoretical explanation regarding moving faster than the speed of light is in Lorentz factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor). If an object exceeds the speed of light, you will have an imaginary number in the factor (sqrt(negative number)). In addition, to accelerate something to the speed of light, you will need an infinite amount of energy.

These are interesting discoveries. As a nuclear engineer in my past, I find it very intriguing and awaiting for clarifications.

plenty of room for a cock up where?
=D

Oh damn, I didn't notice this thread. Sorry.

Baski, you are wrong to say I am wrong. In fact, I would say you are wronger because of this than the initial wrongness that you wrongly accused me of being.

http://images.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/10190597.jpg

Old news is old.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/italian-out-of-tune-superluminal.html#more

Read the comments too, overexcited physics fags.

'Because it shows that all science has are "theories" which are always shown to be wrong in the long run.'

no this doesn't disprove previous theories. If you phrase a previous theory as 'everything we know about travels slower than or at the speed of light' this is just something we didn't know about. (or hadn't measured)

it extends the theory, which is the strength of science. That said, there may be a systematic measurement error, or something fairly simple going on which explains this.

Or as pointed out the lorentz factor could be correct and the neutrinos could have imaginary mass. (which would be weird and new and wonderful, but not change te underlying theory too much)

Admittedly people outside of science don't like it when scientists say "this is always true EXCEPT-".

Scientific "theories" let me use the internet, drive my car, and refrigerate my food.

When God's Immutable Truths of Truthiness can let me do those things, I'll be listening.

Prayer already travels faster than the speed of light! Eat THAT, Science!

@ednos

LOL

"This just in--neutrinos found to travel faster than the speed of love."

Also, entangled particles already transmit data to each other faster than light, so it's not like this is the first thing to ever question the notion of nothing going faster than c.

And, of course:

http://xkcd.com/955/

^About to post that

OK, so I have a question:

They're shooting these neutrinos through all kinds of nonsense in between CERN and wherever they're taking the measurements; why are the getting there. I get that neutrinos are electrically neutral and are only affected by the Weak Force, but why aren't the smacking into stuff between here and there? Is the Mean Free Path of a neutrino 500 miles?

Not even close.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/neutrino3.html

lol

Yeah, I just looked it up; looks like the MFP is on the order of light-years, depending on the material. Well, that explains that!

What is remarkable, isn't that the neutrinos aren't being interfered with along the way, it's that they can build detectors that DO interacts with them.

Particle physics certainly isn't my forte so I don't know the nitty gritty of the CERN experiments or what neutrino detecting devices they use.

That's just a crazy MFP. I'm used to dealing with things with a MFP on the order of μm!

Yeah, I have no idea how the detector works? Must be some sort of Weak Force emitter, no?

The only neutrino interactions that I've learnt anything about are at SNO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Neutrino_Observatory

And even still, most of it is way over my head and I'm not sure what flavours they're detecting and whether or not that changes things.

"Also, entangled particles already transmit data to each other faster than light"

but is that in any useful way (i mean, it is information which can't violate causality, or so i vaguely understand it in hand-wavey arguments...) and thus doesn't upset the results of einstiens local-causal universe... it just messes with the locality of it...

i beleive the detectors work by assuming a very low efficiency, ie only 0.000001% of neutrinos will actually be detected...

We currently don't know how to transmit useful info with entangled particles, but I don't think we're sure it's impossible.

i think the issue is that under our current understanding it should be impossible... that said, our current understanding has been known to change

http://imgur.com/gallery/sCDY9

http://xkcd.com/955/

dammit abgemacht. Teach me to post without reading every damn reply. :-)