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Birthright Citizenship RobVG June 29, 2025 3:34 pm (CurrentEvents)

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Musk trashes his own AI after it chose a liberal worldview. RobVG June 23, 2025 9:56 am (CurrentEvents)

Psyche keeps its date with an asteroid BuckGalaxy June 22, 2025 5:21 pm (Space/Science)

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Neutrinos are FTL-capable again. November 18, 2011 11:12 am Robert

That’s the conclusion from a reexamination of the test data from earlier this year, and new tests by the OPERA team using a lower beam intensity. The lower beam intensity yields sparse results, and so far they’ve gotten only 20 “clean” events. But those events seem to confirm that neutrinos were traveling faster than c. (Faster-than-light neutrinos confirmed by Alan Boyle) They’re also looking at the time reference system (GPS???) as an obvious source of error, and they’re talking about replacing it with a direct fiber optic cable between the two sites. That’d be a smart move. Why complicate a physics experiment by requiring an n-body orbital computation as part of the results?

When this first was reported earlier this year, my pet theory was that the neutrinos were surfing on an Alcubierre wave front, the phenomenon behind the Acubierre drive that fleshes out the Star Trek warp drive notion. I read the description of neutrinos traveling “close” to the speed of light and being “nearly” massless, and those seem like the perfect conditions to warp space asymmetrically in the vicinity of the particle, mostly behind it because so close to c the information about the mass distortion is overrun by the particle and can’t propagate far ahead of it.

Or something like that. Sounds nice and sciencey, doesn’t it?

The controversy is far, far from over. This is a second report from the same team, so it gets less street cred than an independent experiment. That’ll take time, probably years more.

  • ... by BuckGalaxy 2011-11-23 17:26:51
    • How about if the acceleration is constant but the speed is not. Do photons accelerate to their propagation speed; if so, ... by johannes 2011-11-19 18:41:35
      • Maybe half true...density does matter to photons, however...it does not matter to its neutrino carrier, so when the photons "stop", ... by Jody 2011-11-25 08:55:56
        • I'd say that if there's acceleration, then the speed won't be constant. But the basic conceptual problem here is that ... by Robert 2011-11-19 19:17:04
          • That is an interesting concept, it would mean that the photon is moving at the speed of light even when ... by johannes 2011-11-20 19:30:17
        • Wouldn't the speed of light be the speed of perception? The observable? Maybe neutrinos are the speed of the unobservable? by Jody 2011-11-19 10:54:28
          • It sure would. Sounds like you've been plugged into the Krell machine again ;-) When I puzzled it out, it began ... by Robert 2011-11-19 13:26:52
          • Newtonian physics explained things well until more sophisticated clocks came along. Einstein was complemented by quantum mechanics. As measurements get ... by bowser 2011-11-18 14:58:39
            • What makes Alcubierre's idea so clever is that it doesn't actually violate Einsteinian physics. The ship would be motionless inside ... by Robert 2011-11-18 18:28:29
              • When Spock looks at the readout, it says "unknown form of radiation." by TB 2011-11-18 19:41:00
                • You're right that "radiation" is ambiguous, and now that I think about it, Spock's cliche is "unknown form of energy". ... by Robert 2011-11-19 13:40:35

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