CERN Confirms Neutrinos Not Faster Than Light | Hacker News Reader

CERN Confirms Neutrinos Not Faster Than Light

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37 pointssparknlaunch26 comments

While it's awesome that the experiment has been corrected and is now working properly, it is a little disappointing to me that the answer isn't so strange.

I would have loved it if it turned out to be something real just because it would have made some form of communication between planets without a delay possible.

Eh, this was never about instantaneous travel, this was about a slight increase in speed.

Instantaneous communication causes some serious problems with time/causality anyway.

That said, there's always Tachyons. [0] and I think the information transfer that happens during quantum teleportation is faster than light [1]

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

FYI, quantum teleportation does not transmit information faster than light. You'll notice from the explanation in your link that some information still needs to be transmitted through a classical channel (ie at light speed).

I am aware... I just thought it was something the commenter would find interesting.

Edit: to be clear... I know that quantum transportation doesn't allow for FTL communication... but the fact that the change is not subject to a speed of light delay is what's interesting.

Eh, this was never about instantaneous travel, this was about a slight increase in speed.

The thing you need to understand about relativity is that travelling even slightly faster than the speed of light in any frame of reference is instantaneous communication, in some other frame of reference.

If I send a signal from point A and it arrives at point B just infinitesimally faster than the speed of light, then according to an observer in some other reference frame the transmission from A and arrival at B happened simultaneously, and according to some other observer the arrival actually happened before the transmission.

It's also important to note that once you have any FTL travel you automatically have time travel (or at least, backwards-in-time communication). But I'd have to draw a diagram to explain why.

I think you misunderstand

>travelling even slightly faster than the speed of light in any frame of reference is instantaneous communication, in some other frame of reference.

Even traveling at the speed of light is instantaneous communication... from the photon's frame of reference.

If neutrinos were traveling at 3.7 miles per second faster than light it would indicate that we simply don't understand how the universe works.

Let me put it this way: Given our current understanding of the universe going faster than the speed of light should violate causality. It should be impossible to travel 3.7 miles per second faster than light without arriving before you left.

But that doesn't mean that if these neutrinos were traveling 3.7 miles per second faster than light that it would enable instantaneous communication. C + 3.7 miles per second would still take a long time to travel interstellar distances.

>Even traveling at the speed of light is instantaneous communication... from the photon's frame of reference.

Photons don't have a frame of reference. It makes no sense, in relativity, to talk about a frame in which a photon is at rest, and trying to talk about them only leads to nonsense.

I say this not to nitpick, but because the fact that you're trying to use the concept suggests to me that your grasp on relativity might not be that strong.

>But that doesn't mean that if these neutrinos were traveling 3.7 miles per second faster than light that it would enable instantaneous communication. C + 3.7 miles per second would still take a long time to travel interstellar distances.

An object travelling at c+3.7mps in your reference frame is travelling at infinity miles per second in some other (sensible, subluminal) reference frame, that's the point.

This is all undergrad-level stuff.

But It would also violate causality And render the reply button below irrelevant:

Not necessarily, if you pick your reference frame, v>c doesn't necessary violate causality

http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/faster_light_neutrinos_d...

That requires that the source and detector move relative to each other which is not the case here.

It never made sense to me why they publicized the result, since it looked so clearly like some kind of experimental screw up. All it could do is make them look like amateurs when it inevitably came out that they bungled something.

I think they were aware of how it looked, as well as the most likely explanation. However, if you have results you cannot explain, you show it to your peers so they can find the error, or confirm the discovery. They never went public and said "we made a discovery". They went public and said "this is what we did, this is what we got".

I question their ability to perform science if they have to rely on their peers to find problems in their own equipment. When my car breaks down, I go to a mechanic to have it fixed, but when my software fails, I don't publish it and ask the community to figure out why it doesn't work.

I question your understanding of how science works. Actually, I question your ability to program also. I often go out to the community to find out if there are other issues, or maybe something simple that I forgot. Using your peers for help is not a weakness, it's a strength.

Science is about performing experiments and replicating them, not about debugging hardware. A friend of mine famously complained that his computer was broken because his C programs weren't compiling. He had misspelled "include." The "community" didn't need to step up and help him. He needed to learn how to use his tools.

Well, I wasn't sure before, but you've removed all doubt.

You know, I'm not a scientist, so it's quite possible I've misunderstood the situation here. But if nothing else, what I'm saying is exactly what you can expect the average person with some education—albeit not a scientist—to think, based on a casual knowledge of physics (the role of the speed of light, etc.) reading these headlines.

I don't think I've been particularly discourteous to you, but if I have, I apologize. It would be more helpful in the future to show me what I haven't seen rather than simply insult me.

Open Science.

Programmers do ask the community to find and fix bugs.

See, for example, Google offering bounties on Chrome exploits, or the Tarsnap bug bounties.

(http://www.tarsnap.com/bugbounty.html)

Are you suggesting these are bad things?

The scientists had weird results. They checked everything; they wrote up the results; they released the results cautiously, asking other people to check for errors.

They are not to blame for the appalling state of scientific reporting in mainstream media.

So in the age of twitter, you scorn a bunch of good physicists for making public their hard earned (but ultimately wrong) and novel experimental data?

What does Twitter have to do with double-checking your work?

The original paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897) had some 188 authors. I doubt they didn't double-check or 100-check the results. After some point the data just had to be considered believable or worthy of publication. You really think it would be better if they didn't let the world know about it?

A very good post on this by Matt Strassler from earlier this year:

http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-phy...

There were apparently two problems:

1. An improperly calibrated clock 2. A fiber optic cable was not fully plugged in. This led to a little bit of light leaking out from the cable, which lead to a (very small) delay in recognition of the arrival of a pulse on the fiber.

Yes, modern physics experiments are pretty complicated and lots of things can go wrong!

end of the article "After months of investigation, physicists have ruled that the speedy neutrinos observed were likely due to a faulty connection in an optical fiber of the Master Clock." i really do wonder why negative attitude to my "were likely goes both ways" - they have ruled (not proved) that something is likely. please. either the article is stupid or those who have ruled.

were likely goes both ways.

In other news: sky is blue, grass is green.

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