Other Faster than the speed of light?

Going by the words (not the equations) in the abstract it seems that they're measuring the results with greater accuracy (precision?) than the numbers they were using for the speed of light in a vacuum.

I think.

 

Actually it makes no difference if you measure c with or against the rotation of earth. The speed remains the same.

One good argument i read about this observation is that we measure the neutrino burst from a supernova just after the EM burst suggesting they are slower than light speed. I'd wait for this to be properly verified before getting too excited.

 

The speed of light has indeed been measured many times, but it is still only assumed that the special theory of relativity is correct and therefore that the speed of light is constant; such an assumption cannot be empirically verified.

 

Me too.

Think all of the theories described within it will have to be re-thought if this proves to be correct.

 

If special relativity is proved to be incorrect then it almost certainly implies maxwells equations are incorrect which I believe invalidates GUT. This effectively rewrites the last 100 years of theoretical physics. It's a scary thought, but remember that this is exactly what happened 100 years ago.

My copy was misprinted and became incomprehensible about halfway through. Bit of a bummer.

We should all remember that Neutrinos are highly invisible particles; it takes 60m deep wells linesd with detectors to detect a handfull every day when something like a billion of them pass through your eyes every second.

 

Personally I think this is an issue of margin of error. No measurement can be 100% accurate, but with something travelling so fast even a 0.01% margin of error throws the SoL out by almost 30,000 m/s! Of course, the same applies to how they measured the speed of the neutrinos

 

A bartender says "We don't serve Tachyons in here."

A Tachyon walks into a bar.



Ontopic: this is pretty cool if it stands up to scrutiny.

 

The speed of light is known much more accurately though. In fact, the speed of light is defined as 299,792,458 m/s, and the length of the meter has an uncertainty on the order of one part per billion (I think). It's much more likely that there's some systematic error here than that the result is due to imprecise measurements (note the distinction between accuracy and precision).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

 

Let's make sure we're talking about the correct Speed of Light here, first in the practical sense - i.e. what we know is that the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s. Many things work on it, and we've measured and defined it so exactly that it cannot be adjusted or incorrect.

Second, in the sense of Relativity, this theorised absolute speed that cannot be exceeded or even reached by particles with mass. It's called the Speed of Light, but if we've found particles which can travel faster, it would have to be the Absolute Speed or something. That's what is possibly (but very unlikely) broken.

Personally I'm expecting it to be a systematic experimental error, rather than a fundamental flaw in particle mechanics, but I'm quite prepared (and excited) by the possibility that I'm wrong.

What's the Brian Cox/Jeff Forshaw book like? Do they come across as enigmatic and interesting people through the text? Jazzy Jeff Forshaw was the single most interesting lecturer I had at uni, he had a very uncluttered view on things which was quite enlightening.

 

Personally I can't see special relativity being fundemantally wrong given how often it is used for practical applications (GPS has to take special relativity into account). Bu as I said before, that's not solid proof that we're right.

Hopefully what this does is open up whole new branches of science to explore.

It was good for the parts that we're all jumbled up in my copy although they did seem to think their reader was incapable of simple arithmetic.

 

Some cool stuff here about the measurement of some physical properties (and their corresponding theoretical predictions). Its well worth a listen even though not really related.

Edit: Hrm - looks like the videos are a bit broken atm - shame as they are properly awesome.

 

*Nothing* travels faster than bad news...

 

Or Usain Bolt

 

Here's one I read in the newspaper this morning:

There was a neutrino so bright
Which could travel far faster than light
It went out one day
In a relative way
And came back the previous night

 

If they have incorrectly measured the distance between the points because the target is moving closer or further away from the origin during travel, when they have taken the distance to be the physical distance between the two at a given point in time, then they can't have an accurate calculation of speed, unless I'm missing something very basic.

 

Basic as in general relativity?

Although I'm not sure what applies in a rotational reference frame.

EDIT: Basically we can assume the earth is stationary and the universe is moving if we want.

 

Being discussed now http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/
Also paper can be found here http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.4897.pdf

 

Sounds like something Sheldon would say,

 

BAZINGA!