<p>Also the apparatus seems sensitive enough that continental drift has to be accounted for in the detector – a calculation promptly upset by large earthquake.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, I walked by some people discussing this. One critic has said that if this was true, the neutrinos emitted by a discovered supernova would have arrived 4 years earlier than the light which was not the case. I was just sent a copy of the paper entitled: “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector
in the CNGS beam” which describes the experiment. I’ll be looking at it this weekend.</p>
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<p>No reason to be sad. Einstein himself would be thrilled and excited to find out that someone had potentially discovered something new about the world. </p>
<p>That’s the cool thing about science. There are no divine absolute truths that must remain true forever.</p>
<p>The other cool thing is if someone makes a claim, it can be verified.</p>
<p>Only confirmed about 3 months ago, [Physics</a> - Single photons obey the speed limits](<a href=“Physics - Single photons obey the speed limits”>Physics - Single photons obey the speed limits) . And a photon is massless, but a neutrino has a non-zero rest mass. This is going to be interesting… :-)</p>
<p>This is going to be extremely damaging to Einstein’s future.</p>
<p>Einstein doesn’t have a future ----- he is dead. :-)</p>
<p>Oh hey look, you got the joke!</p>
<p>Only got too much idle time for the moment. Can’t move beyond the speed of light. :-)</p>
<p>I am hoping that some how some way this discovery will allow me to be 30 again.</p>
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<p>No, only falsified. Like you said, no absolute truths.</p>
<p>This reminds me of the cold fusion preprints that rocketed about the lab I was in a while ago. Except perhaps that with the speed of light paper even the authors seem skeptical of the findings.</p>
<p>There could be many explanations from the results, it could be something inherently wrong in the experimental setup or it could be factors influencing the results no one thought about, could be a lot of things. One of the reasons scientific method demands publication of results, setup, etc is so that others can try it, a result is not considered validated until it can be repeated by others, simply because of issues with calibration or with local influences.</p>
<p>It is also possible that neutrinos have some properties that haven’t been detected before this, that allows them to travel faster then light, which would be an extension of knowledge. There was a hypothetical class of particles postulated a long time ago, called tachyons, that could only go faster then light (they turned into energy when they hit lightspeed or below). No one ever detected them as far as I know, but maybe some variety of neutrino is faster then light in some circumstances…</p>
<p>I suspect it is some sort of unintentional error in the experiment, but we will see. If it turns out to be true, it means that Einstein’s theories have limitations, which a lot of theories do. Newtonian physics is still perfectly valid, as long as you are talking speeds well less then then c, clerk-maxwell’s equations still apply, though so much followed them and so forth. The difference with science is that it never claims absolute truth for any theory, that if something comes along that seems to question a theory or aspects of it, science works on that to gain better understanding. </p>
<p>Of course, I am sure the bible thumpers will cite this trying to show that bad old science and its theories are ‘guesses’ and how evolution therefore is just a guess and the earth could be 6000 years old (and you can turn lead into gold, oxygen burns because of phlogiston and the ether exists).</p>
<p>Those tachyons were very useful in Star Trek though! :)</p>
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<p>This was my understanding - that the theory said that if something traveled faster than the speed of light, it went backwards in time. Therefore, because nothing goes backward in time, nothing can go faster than the speed of light. This was the explanation given to us as undergrad physics majors. I can’t remember the calculation, but a “negative t” was on the board and the prof said “of course” nothing goes backwards in time.</p>
<p>I couldn’t understand why he could be so sure of that. Who really knows?</p>
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<p>Interesting. Doc, I’ll be interested in your reading of that paper.</p>
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<p>not being an expert in science or religion, i do not see the contradiction between the two.</p>
<p>Considering the Higgs ocean, why would it be so shocking that neutrinos’ speed limit is just a tiny bit above that of photons? Special relativity could be fine, with photons just not quite being the fastest particle out there. Maybe neutrinos slip through the ocean just a tad faster.</p>
<p>I’m with Randall Munroe, who writes xkcd. Check out “Neutrinos” on the xkcd site, from last Friday.</p>
<p>“I suspect it is some sort of unintentional error in the experiment”</p>
<p>How about an intentional error in the paper, to win a $200 bet?</p>