Re-Test Confirms Neutrinos Can Go Faster Than Light: Astute Bloggers Solves The "Faster Than Light" Problem

Re-Test Confirms Neutrinos Can Go Faster Than Light!?

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

The answer is simple: the speed of light is not perfectly constant but goes up and down a little - perhaps as little as 60 billionths of a second.

Light's speed as a fixed constant is a need/artifact of science/engineering - actually agreed to by convention - and not the way the universe operates. In the real world there's a little flux.

Here's the news:

BBC

The team which found that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and confirmed the result.

If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.

Critics of the first report in September had said that the long bunches of neutrinos (tiny particles) used could introduce an error into the test.

The new work used much shorter bunches.

It has been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community.

The experiments have been carried out by the Opera collaboration - short for Oscillation Project with Emulsion (T)racking Apparatus.

It hinges on sending bunches of neutrinos created at the Cern facility (actually produced as decays within a long bunch of protons produced at Cern) through 730km (454 miles) of rock to a giant detector at the INFN-Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy.

The initial series of experiments, comprising 15,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance.

The idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum forms a cornerstone in physics - first laid out by James Clerk Maxwell and later incorporated into Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Timing is everything

Faster than Light.