THE SPEED OF LIGHT CAN BE EXCEEDED! Fuckn' hell!

[Warren Dew]

Sorry, I only had a few seconds for a reply before.

I actually looked at something like this a few days ago. However, the magnitude of the effect - the amount by which clocks are slowed due to the position on the surface of the earth in the earth's gravity well - is about one part in 10E9. Since the observed effect is more than one part in 10E5 - more than four orders of magnitude higher - this effect cannot explain OPERA's observations.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Sorry, I only had a few seconds for a reply before.

I actually looked at something like this a few days ago. However, the magnitude of the effect - the amount by which clocks are slowed due to the position on the surface of the earth in the earth's gravity well - is about one part in 10E9. Since the observed effect is more than one part in 10E5 - more than four orders of magnitude higher - this effect cannot explain OPERA's observations.

Thanks for that, Warren. I tried to find the figures myself but they were a little elusive. I did think it was perhaps a little obvious and that someone must have considered it and come up with a good reason for it not to work that way - but you never know...

[mistermack]

I'm inclined to resist the idea of neutrinos not being affected by gravity, or the curvature of spacetime.
To deviate from the curvature of spacetime is in effect to experience acceleration at 90 deg to the direction of travel.
I suppose if the neutrinos from a supernova were to encounter gravitational lensing, it would be possible to confirm or rule out that phenomenon. I'm just going on instinct, it doesn't feel right.

I do like the other idea of the current value of c being a tiny bit low, though.

[Rum]

Seems they have been caught doing the thing they shouldn't be again! The naughty subatomic things!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

[tattuchu]

It's bad enough that they're doing naughty things, but doing it right in front of people...

[Clinton Huxley]

Nutrino? That's something you put on a sammich....

[Animavore]

This could've went in with the topic already on this as it is a repeat of the same experiment.

[Mysturji]

done it again. The neutrinos have

[Atheist-Lite]

Einstein had a good run. Now we know he was spouting shit like all the rest.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Seems they have been caught doing the thing they shouldn't be again! The naughty subatomic things!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

Could just be that the 'improvements' made to the experiment still haven't removed the source of the error.

[Warren Dew]

Seems they have been caught doing the thing they shouldn't be again! The naughty subatomic things!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

Could just be that the 'improvements' made to the experiment still haven't removed the source of the error.

Exactly. The only difference was that the new experiment didn't rely on statistics, which only makes a difference for scientists that don't understand statistics.

[Schneibster]

The only difference was that the new experiment didn't rely on statistics, which only makes a difference for scientists that don't understand statistics.

Poser alert.

[Warren Dew]

The only difference was that the new experiment didn't rely on statistics, which only makes a difference for scientists that don't understand statistics.

Poser alert.

Good of you to alert us to you.

[Schneibster]

Explain Bayesian statistics for us, Warren.

[Atheist-Lite]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/ ... ZX20111120

Study rejects "faster than light" particle finding

(Reuters) - An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."

They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

(continued)

I suppose you could argue that since this is beyond the non-linearity of light speed the ordinary rules of Einsteinian physics might no longer apply?