Did anone watch the programme tonight on faster than light particles?

Just watched it and very interesting it is too, but it no more smashes Einstein's theory than I can walk on water.

Basically it came down to one of these.

1. It's down to experimental/measuring error.
2. Neutrinos have tachyonic properties
3. The particles took a shortcut thru a brane.

None of that destroys Einstein's theory. At worst it may be that the neutrino, a most wierd particle, can, under certain circs can travel faster than light, equally it may prove that the neutrino is technically massless, and thus not affected by the speed of light limit.

At best it might be a step on the way to demonstrating a 'theory of everything'.

If you recall I opened a thread on it a short while back bil.
Still keeping an open mind on it myself.

Did you watch the programme? For me, a very significant detail was the measurements carried out on a supernova a few years ago. They recorded when the flash of light arrived, and measured when the pulse of neutrinos, that would have been created at the same time arrived.

As expected, the neutrinos arrived shortly after the light. Had these been travelling even slightly faster than the light, they would have arrived 4 years earlier. Do you see what I mean? There we had an experiment that gave us a huge distance to measure it over. The experiment that gave these wierd results was carried out over a TINY distance.

Look at it like this. I want you to imagine that you are measuring a piece of wire, about a metre long, and your measurement is capable of being accurate to 1/10 of a millimetre. (Check my figures carefully please) That gives you a potential error of one part in 10,000. Now if I ask you to measure a sphere of 1 mm diameter, using the same tool, your figure has a 1 in 10 error.

In this particle experiment, the one had a measurement time in nanoseconds, the other in lightyears. Millions of them.

This disparity is so great that for me error is favourite (Or an overlooked item). Plus, Occam's razor tells us that the simplest answer is usually correct.

However that doesn't make science sexy, so we need people screaming that Einstein was wrong, tearing up the physics books and so on.

That's a bit like saying the architect of a huge building got it wrong, because a subcontractor painted the inside of a toilet door the wrong colour.

Looking at Einstein's theory that nothing can go faster than the speed of light if it possesses mass, there's an interesting thought.

You know how they explained this in a couple of sentences, why nothing with any mass at all can exceed lightspeed.



The really interesting stuff is in the part where they say that this only applies to things that have mass. Now, if you could make something appear massless, then just maybe we can travel at ftl speeds.

Thinking about that further, just as electricity and magnetism were shown to be interdependant, ie you can create a magnetic field with electricity, and vice versa, if there is a theory of everything, then maybe you can manipulate mass electrically, say by suspending inertia so that to the universe your vehicle and everything in it appears massless, then just maybe you could jack that up to plus lightspeed very easily.

Technically massless? You mean like light?

Yes I watched this & yes an interesting program (well for me anyway)

The first part about Einstein's early years just showed how far his thinking was for his time (staggering) and even today his thoughts/ideas/theory's are still the bedrock & all of this he knocked together in his spare time (well kind of)

Light photons are massless, but neutrinos do have mass, and under normal circs definitely travel slower than light. My thought was that if they apparantly have travelled faster than light then this might be because they have gne thru something like a wormhole, or else for a brief period they appeared massless. thus 'technically massless, since they do have mass, however slight.

Hmm, what puzzled me was this

Are you suggesting that only things with mass are affected by the limit? In which case why is light also subject to that limit?

My understanding is that nothing, regardless of whether it has mass or non, can travel faster than the speed of light.



Though I agree that it's more likely to be an error than a re-write of the laws of physics.

I think that nothing can reach the speed of light that has mass, because by the time it gets there it would have infinite mass. light has no mass, so that rule doesn't apply.

Theoretical particles like tachyons might be able to travel faster, but then we don't know what their properties might be.

Don't knock the postulated particle. Maths has imaginary numbers, and if that kind of thing is good enough for maths, then it's good enough for physics too!

Oh yeah, my money is firmly on it being an error or a misunderstanding.

Even light has a limit, if the current laws of physics are corect.

The usual quoted speed of light is that of light travelling in a vaccuum.

It travels slower in other media.

Which is why we get defraction when it passes into a glass prism and hence the spectrum.

and the rainbow.

REFRACTION is the bending of a wave when it enters a medium where it's speed is different. The refraction of light when it passes from a fast medium to a slow medium bends the light ray toward the normal to the boundary between the two media.

DIFFRACTION refers to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle such as the slight bending of light as it passes around the edge of an object.
The amount of bending depends on the relative size of the wavelength of light

pedant that I am, I cannot find the word defraction

Yes.

I didn't see the programme and it must just have been the way I read it, but your OP made me think the programme had given the impression that things with no mass have no limit on speed. They do, of course, at least as we understand them currently.