Faster than the Speed of Light.

[CatInASuit]

CERN laboratory has a quandary. It appears that in one of their experiments that they had found particles travelling faster than the speed of light. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, this is impossible.

A stream of neutrinos were measured travelling between two points and appear to have made the distance faster than is possible. They have been over the results several times and are opening up all the details to other scientists to try and confirm what may or may not have just happened.

What is good, is that a lot of the scientists are being very, very cautious about the result. This isn't like room temperature fusion, where it was announced and swiftly debunked. This is a group of people trying to understand what the hell just happened.

But if true, this could mean cause and effect is no longer certain.

Of course, the neutrinos could have been moving faster than light and were heading towards their destruction instead of their creation.

More details here for starters.

Even XKCD has picked this one up quickly.

[Rube E. Tewesday]

This would be so extremely cool if it were true, but it seems much more likely that there's a subtle measuring error. They seem to be working at the very limits of what it's possible to measure.

[Zuul]

This is a group of people trying to understand what the hell just happened.

The cause of most great laboratory discoveries.

If they can figure out what happened, it'll be a valuable addition to our scientific knowledge. Even if it was only a measurement error and they're able to come up with a better way to measure, that's still going to be useful.

[Elendil's Heir]

Agreed. But no matter how emphatically it's been stated over the years, I've never completely accepted that the speed of light is the absolute speed limit of the universe. Humanity has believed other seemingly ironclad things with equal fervor and later been proven wrong.

[CatInASuit]

I think what has worried most of the scientists is the implication of what can occur if the speed of light is not absolute. It sets up a completely new paradigm they will have to try and work out theories for.

[CatInASuit]

Well, they went and repeated the test again.

According to the results, the neutrinos broke the speed of light again.

Looks like the beam of neutrinos is ok. Time to work out what else might be, if at all, skewing the results.

[Zuul]

"There are more checks of systematics currently under discussion, one of them could be a synchronisation of the time reference at CERN and Gran Sasso independently from the GPS (Global Positioning System), using possibly a fibre."

...

"OPERA's observation of a similar time delay with a different beam structure only indicates no problem with the batch structure of the beam, it doesn't help to understand whether there is a systematic delay which has been overlooked," said Jenny Thomas, co-spokesman for the Chicago-based lab's own neutrino experiment, MINOS.

It does seem pretty likely to be some sort of systematic delay, but every effort for greater accuracy will improve their data in general.

[Oliveloaf]

Maybe the speed of light isn't a real barrier, but warp 10 still is.

[Zuul]

Well, you can break the warp 10 barrier, but the results aren't pretty.

[Orual]

I kind of hope that a bunch of the scientists at CERN do turn themselves into giant salamanders.

[OneCentStamp]

The fuck is that?!

[Zuul]

The giant salamanders are what you turn into if you break the warp 10 barrier. It's a good idea to take your lady captain with you when you do it so you have somebody to make baby giant salamanders with.

This wasn't addressed in the latest article CIAS posted, but I just saw Tuckerfan had posted another article on the subject a couple of weeks ago on GB. This one suggests the explanation is relativity itself.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands went and crunched the numbers on how much relativity should have effected the experiment, and found that the correct compensation should be about 32 additional nanoseconds on each end, which neatly takes care of the 60 nanosecond speed boost that the neutrinos originally seemed to have.

If that's true, then it's still relatively cool.

[OneCentStamp]

If that's true, then it's still relatively cool.

[CatInASuit]

This wasn't addressed in the latest article CIAS posted, but I just saw Tuckerfan had posted another article on the subject a couple of weeks ago on GB. This one suggests the explanation is relativity itself.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands went and crunched the numbers on how much relativity should have effected the experiment, and found that the correct compensation should be about 32 additional nanoseconds on each end, which neatly takes care of the 60 nanosecond speed boost that the neutrinos originally seemed to have.

If that's true, then it's still relatively cool.

It's an interesting idea and you would hope they could prove it that way.

Then again, you would have hoped that when setting up the experiment, the researchers would have accounted for it in the first place.

[Zuul]

Yeah, it seems like the sort of thing physicists would keep in mind when doing experiments like this. Maybe they did, which is why that avenue of inquiry hasn't been brought up again.

[CatInASuit]

A faulty wire. A simple faulty wire between a GPS Unit and a computer may have been to blame for the anomolous results.

More details here

So, it appears that this time round, the scientists were right to caution everyone.