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Cheers - AE

Friday, 23 September 2011

Does this mean we get faster internet?

Click for hyperspace wormhole to the article
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.
The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.
A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos - tiny particles that pervade the cosmos - were fired over a period of three years from CERN towards Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors.
Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds - or 60 billionths of a second - less than light beams would have taken.
"It is a tiny difference," said Ereditato, who also works at Berne University in Switzerland, "but conceptually it is incredibly important. The finding is so startling that, for the moment, everybody should be very prudent."
Ereditato declined to speculate on what it might mean if other physicists, who will be officially informed of the discovery at a meeting in CERN on Friday, found that OPERA's measurements were correct.
"I just don't want to think of the implications," he said. "We are scientists and work with what we know."
Yes, the implications for physics are huge, but I'm a practical man with an occasionally unreliable internet connection and I'm interested in applications. So answer the damn question - faster internet or what? Incidentally, I don't see any point in attempting to develop this as a means of transportation. The security theatre bozos would go nuts about the time travel aspects and insist on coming round your house to strip search you the weekend before.

Comments (6)

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Right at this moment I simply do not believe it. Claiming to have exceeded the speed of light is an extraordinary claim, given that SR has kept up with some really tricky experiments that set out to invalidate it. Modern scientists are not like Feynman. They are really after publicity, which gets them their grants. If they can produce some research as a by-product of their cash milking, that probably can't hurt. These guys seem to be a classic case, given that the best publicity is always going to be something that means "Einstein was wrong!!!!1!~!one". That's why I presently don't buy it.
1 reply · active 704 weeks ago
To be fair to 'em the 'Einstein was wrong' bit seems to be something the media have tacked on afterwards to beat the whole thing up. The impression I get is that they are being sceptical of their own results, which is properly scientific, and just chucking it out there for people to try and replicate. If nobody can replicate the results independently then that's that. Most likely candidate in my mind is instrumental error, but on the off chance it's true there'd better be faster internet for me in it or I just won't care that much. :D
Considering that neutrinos are generated in the heart of stars (e.g. our very own sun) and that they generally pay no attention to dull things like planets, just how are CERN generating these wily beasties and then "pump" them to Italy?
Maybe they're after research grants to pay off national debt?
1 reply · active 704 weeks ago
Research grants from who? Nobody's got any money.
There are some sources currently claiming someone got their sums wrong.
1 reply · active 704 weeks ago
Or that. Either way, extraordinary claim so extraordinary evidence needed. In the meantime we can be tongue in cheek about it.

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