Faster than the speed of light.

nm

I dropped Physics in HS, someone mind explaining this?

polska. wrote:I dropped Physics in HS, someone mind explaining this?

Turned out to be a piece of shit article. The title said it was confirmed that something did go faster than the speed of light. So i posted then i read it and was

They were bullshitting and just said oh we agree with the experiment basically.

They are tiny particles called neutrinos. They are reported to be able to travel faster than the speed of light, thought I believe they are a power that we have not yet been able to understand how to harness or use.

Heard about this somewhere......it being an unbelievably small amount of time faster.

Polska bear with me as i was never the best at explaining things. Einstien was a great man who made an amazing theory of relativity and blah blah blah.

His theory was proven to be correct by experimental data and because of this it was taken to be correct.

From the theory we figured out that it is impossible for anything with a mass to be accelerated to the speed of light. (guys in korea tested this lately and still correct, Electrons fired and they get close to the speed of light by it slows down as it gets to it)

Now then this experiment happened. We can't say what exactly will happpen because of how little we know about neutrinos.

Mustangt125 wrote:They are tiny particles called neutrinos. They are reported to be able to travel faster than the speed of light, thought I believe they are a power that we have not yet been able to understand how to harness or use.

As mustang said, Neutrinos are tiny particles but tiny doesn't cover it. We don't have equipment that can measure how heavy or how big they are. I was asleep in quantum physics but from my understanding they are a result of radioactive decay.

People say it has a mass but it so tiny that it basically zero (but it isn't). This is the accepted theory but some people are trying to say they are massless.

That is the problem, If they are found to be travelling faster than the speed of light and they do have mass then a big part of physics just falls apart.

If you don't get anything just ask.

Lux wrote:Heard about this somewhere......it being an unbelievably small amount of time faster.

Still faster....

So if it's a little bit faster, what does that mean? Einstein was a bit off? It doesn't actually upset any system or anything, surely.

didnt they slow the speed of light to something like 33 MPH

Blackpool Rule wrote:didnt they slow the speed of light to something like 33 MPH

Because NOTHING travels faster than 33 MPH, right?

Eternal Witcher wrote:So if it's a little bit faster, what does that mean? Einstein was a bit off? It doesn't actually upset any system or anything, surely.

it does. It's meant to be impossible for anything with mass to reach the speed of light.

So you say, so what are the implications if that limit is exceeded? Apocalypse? Human theory can always be proven wrong, wasn't it Einstein himself who said that nothing is constant?

Blackpool Rule wrote:didnt they slow the speed of light to something like 33 MPH

Hall of shame.

Eternal Witcher wrote:So you say, so what are the implications if that limit is exceeded? Apocalypse? Human theory can always be proven wrong, wasn't it Einstein himself who said that nothing is constant?

according to the theory it just can't. It is impossible.

but if the limit is exceeded then his theory is wrong and a lot of modern physics will turn out to be wrong.

Someone will have to come up with something new.

Eternal Witcher wrote:So you say, so what are the implications if that limit is exceeded? Apocalypse? Human theory can always be proven wrong, wasn't it Einstein himself who said that nothing is constant?

It's one step closer to time travel if we can exceed the speed of light. Seriously.

You guys are all missing the point though, that this is just an experiment that's gone a bit wrong. If your machine finds that particles have travelled faster than light then your machine isn't working properly.

ResurrectionRooney wrote:

Eternal Witcher wrote:So you say, so what are the implications if that limit is exceeded? Apocalypse? Human theory can always be proven wrong, wasn't it Einstein himself who said that nothing is constant?

It's one step closer to time travel if we can exceed the speed of light. Seriously.

You guys are all missing the point though, that this is just an experiment that's gone a bit wrong. If your machine finds that particles have travelled faster than light then your machine isn't working properly.

2 or 3 years of testing, also with people all around the world are working day and night to prove it wrong.

Nothing 100% confirmed yet, You can't say it is wrong.

Yeah, I can, I'm throwing in with Einstein and Prof. Jim Al-Khalili, physicist from Surrey University, who said that if the CERN experiment proves to have broken the speed of light, he will eat his boxer shorts on live TV.

ResurrectionRooney wrote:Yeah, I can, I'm throwing in with Einstein and Prof. Jim Al-Khalili, physicist from Surrey University, who said that if the CERN experiment proves to have broken the speed of light, he will eat his boxer shorts on live TV.

just like when kyro said that thing about the Pepsi bottle

NZG wrote:

ResurrectionRooney wrote:Yeah, I can, I'm throwing in with Einstein and Prof. Jim Al-Khalili, physicist from Surrey University, who said that if the CERN experiment proves to have broken the speed of light, he will eat his boxer shorts on live TV.

just like when kyro said that thing about the Pepsi bottle

With the greatest of respect to Kyro, he is not Einstein or any professor.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99111&page=1#.Tse8ZcPtRRQ

Everyone's laughing but here is my proof.

Blackpool Rule wrote:http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99111&page=1#.Tse8ZcPtRRQ

Everyone's laughing but here is my proof.

Oh I see what you're saying now. You just worded it quite oddly.

A few weeks after testing again, the neutrinos are still showing up that fraction quicker than the speed of light. I think hundreds of papers have been published trying to prove where the experiment has went wrong, but most have been washed out. Their statistical error still falls outside of the range that would include the speed of light too. It'll still be a few months before any news of note reaches us but it may even take decades before we can really draw a conclusion from this.

Eternal Witcher wrote:So if it's a little bit faster, what does that mean? Einstein was a bit off? It doesn't actually upset any system or anything, surely.

Special relativity would be wrong, because it implies that you need an infinite amount of energy for a massive particle (like a neutrino) to even travel at the speed of light. Causality would also have to be, at least, rewritten.
It could even affect something as relatively basic as our concept of star formation. In fact, just about everything in astronomy would be affected somehow.

Neutrinos have always been considered weird anyway.

If a particle has zero mass (as is the case with 'photons', the name given to particles of light), then according to Einstein's theory of relativity, it must travel exactly at the speed of light. If it has a mass, however small, it can approach the speed of light but never attain it because to do so would require an infinite amount of energy.

and

Supposing the CERN-Gran Sasso experimental result holds up and the neutrinos are in fact traveling faster than the speed of light. Does this mean that Einstein's theory of relativity is completely overthrown? No. Einstein's theory does not rule out particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Such particles, known as tachyons, have always been allowed by the theory but we have never confirmed their existence so far. There have, however, been various false alarms in the past, which is part of the reason for the skepticism about the present claim.

Two quotes that helped me understand this, thought it was worth reposting here.

polska. wrote:

If a particle has zero mass (as is the case with 'photons', the name given to particles of light), then according to Einstein's theory of relativity, it must travel exactly at the speed of light. If it has a mass, however small, it can approach the speed of light but never attain it because to do so would require an infinite amount of energy.

and

Supposing the CERN-Gran Sasso experimental result holds up and the neutrinos are in fact traveling faster than the speed of light. Does this mean that Einstein's theory of relativity is completely overthrown? No. Einstein's theory does not rule out particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Such particles, known as tachyons, have always been allowed by the theory but we have never confirmed their existence so far. There have, however, been various false alarms in the past, which is part of the reason for the skepticism about the present claim.

Two quotes that helped me understand this, thought it was worth reposting here.

where is the second quote from?

I've never learnt about tachyons but i do know neutrinos and how we understand them can't travel faster than the speed of light, therefore if they are found to travel ftl then either what we know about neutrinos are wrong (most likely) or his theory is wrong.

A tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that always moves faster than light. In the language of special relativity,

It is always moving at the speed of light.

Special relativity states it can't be accelerated to the speed of light.

my bad.

Yeah, was reading about tachyons earlier as well. But tachyons always travel faster than light, whereas neutrinos have apparently been observed at both under and over it.

The theory is that nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light. What does this have to do with time travel? Let's say you are on a train that is moving very near or at the speed of light. You decide to get up from your seat and run down the aisle. Since you are going at the speed of the train and running, you can break the speed of light. But since it's impossible to break the speed of light in theory, time actually slows down where you are to prevent you from breaking the speed limit.

If anyone is interested in learning more about it, watch episode 2 of the show "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking", titled "Time Travel".

ahlycotc wrote:The theory is that nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light. What does this have to do with time travel? Let's say you are on a train that is moving very near or at the speed of light. You decide to get up from your seat and run down the aisle. Since you are going at the speed of the train and running, you can break the speed of light. But since it's impossible to break the speed of light in theory, time actually slows down where you are to prevent you from breaking the speed limit.

If anyone is interested in learning more about it, watch episode 2 of the show "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking", titled "Time Travel".

The idea that comes from his theory is that it is impossible to accelerate anything with mass to the speed of light.

I made the same mistake above.

Yeah I know. That's why I said if we had something with the mass (i.e. a train) go near the speed of light somehow, then running inside the train could in theory break the speed barrier. But since nothing with mass can break the speed barrier, time would actually slow you down to prevent you from breaking it.

A bit off-topic, but I'm going to watch a 45 minute documentary about the Roswell Incident right now. Should be interesting.

ahlycotc wrote:Yeah I know. That's why I said if we had something with the mass (i.e. a train) go near the speed of light somehow, then running inside the train could in theory break the speed barrier. But since nothing with mass can break the speed barrier, time would actually slow you down to prevent you from breaking it.

First sentence I didn't read the rest