[Vision2020] Baffling CERN Results Show Neutrinos Faster Than Light Speed

[Ted Moffett]

Warp nine, captain!

Given anthropogenic global warming is a hoax, promoted by "socialist
European scientists"
http://www.lahontanvalleynews.com/article/20070207/Opinion/102070038
along with Darwin's atheist theory of evolution, the deniers of the
credibility of science may pounce on this recent faster than light
speed finding to declare that Einstein's theory of relativity is a
fraud...

Governor Perry, in his presidential bid, can hold more prayer rallys
to promise the hoi polloi the absolute certainty of God, unlike the
world of science that does not offer absolute unquestioning certainty
on anything empirical.... Not that Perry would phrase it that way, of
course.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos

Faster than light particles found, claim scientists

Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a
feat forbidden by Einstein's theory of special relativity

Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 22 September 2011 18.32 EDT

It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the
universe and the concept of time – nothing can travel faster than the
speed of light.

But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world's
largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have
recorded particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden
by Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday
that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information
back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking
havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern – the
European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the
publication of a research paper (pdf) describing the experiment.

Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking
Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic
particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through
the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab.

The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but
after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of
15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived
at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error
margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second.

The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the
speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed
of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were
evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second.

The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being
cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be
sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the
result.

Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the
Guardian: "We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is
never a discovery until other people confirm it.

"When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no
mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn't think of.
We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to
find any errors.

"If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because
trivial things we are clever enough to rule out."

The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise
the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it
with their own experiments.

Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: "If
this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is
something nobody was expecting.

"The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our
understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that
cause comes before effect."

The key point underlying causality is that the laws of physics as we
know them dictate that information cannot be communicated faster than
the speed of light in a vacuum, added Sarkar.

"Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to
our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have
causality, we are buggered."

The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 "bricks"
of photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The
detector weighs a total of 1300 tonnes.

Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by
Ereditato's team, the result is intriguing because its statistical
significance, the measure by which particle physics discoveries stand
and fall, is so strong.

Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being
a fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or
less than one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team's result is six
standard deviations.

Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result
was so radical. "Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have
to be much more prudent," he said.

Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light
processes at Indiana University, said that while physicists would
await confirmation of the result, it was none the less exciting.

"It's such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without
others replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this,"
he told the Guardian.

One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted
that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by
interacting with an unknown field that lurks in the vacuum.

"With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the
limiting speed in nature is the speed of light," he said. "It might
actually be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly."

Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no
electric charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was
not there.

Kostelecky said that if the result was verified – a big if – it might
pave the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum
mechanics, a puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century.

"If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the
structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to
constructing such a unified theory," Kostelecky said.

Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed
another theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be
taking a shortcut through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran
Sasso through extra dimensions. "That can make it look like a particle
has gone faster than the speed of light when it hasn't," he said.

But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at
Sheffield University, said: "Neutrino experimental results are not
historically all that reliable, so the words 'don't hold your breath'
do spring to mind when you hear very counter-intuitive results like
this."

Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago
in the US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS
experiment saw hints of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of
light in 2007 but has yet to confirm them.

• This article was amended on 23 September 2011 to clarify the
relevance of the speed of light to causality.
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett