

Neutrino found traveling faster than speed of light? - icey
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BREAKING_LIGHT_SPEED?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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wetbrain
Reading the other bbc story on the front page, it looks like the scientists
are cautious about the discovery and not claiming that they found something.
They found something that may be significant or could be an error, and are
looking for review.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056>

(better article and discussion)

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pbhjpbhj
Those scientists with their caution, pah! They just want to keep the time-
travelling deloreans to themselves ...

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washedup
Could it be that the light was recorded moving that fast, but that it is
somehow an illusion based on how the data was measured?

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pavel_lishin
It wasn't light, it was a stream of neutrinos.

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sp332
Aren't neutrinos everywhere? How do they know the neutrinos they measured are
the same ones they fired?

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rbanffy
Because they came precisely from the right direction?

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sp332
Yeah, I was just wondering if you could filter based on wavelength or
polarization, like photons. Isn't it really hard to "block" neutrinos coming
from other directions though?

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rbanffy
If the beam is narrow enough, you'll have a larger number of detections inside
the region the beam occupies while the rest of your detector will present
normal activity. While you can't be sure if the neutrinos are coming or going,
the odds some unknown neutrino beam source appeared in direct opposition to
the one you knew about are very slim.

You can also filter by time - you create a source and expect a surge of
detections shortly after. In this specific case, they saw the surge before
they expected it, indicating the neutrinos traveled faster than they should.

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pbhjpbhj
> _the odds some unknown neutrino beam source appeared in direct opposition to
> the one you knew about are very slim._ //

Look any direction in the night sky. Do you see a star. The odds of not seeing
a star in the direction you're looking are far greater than the odds that you
don't have neutrinos coming from that direction.

You can't shield against neutrinos, you can't currently detect a neutrinos
position at two points in spacetime. Haven't yet read the details about this
if they repeated several times with the same result then it looks interesting
- have you a link to their paper (to save me looking!) thanks.

My first thought was that I wonder if this might be a simple case of super-
luminal group velocities or something similar.

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tr
Not CERN. Italian group.
[http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html)

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Pablosan
This headline is terribly misleading. No one is "claiming" faster-than-light
neutrinos. They simply have time measurements that aren't making sense because
they show the neutrinos arriving a couple billionths of a second faster than
they should, and they are opening up the findings to the wider scientific
community to try and explain the anomaly.

It irks me when people sensationalize things and put the wrong spin on the
data. Stop it.

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sp332
Wouldn't this also violate conservation of energy? A particle with any mass,
traveling at the speed of light, would have infinite energy. And accelerating
a particle to that speed would "push back" on the earth with infinite force,
so it might also break conservation of momentum.

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tybris
Whatever happened, there is one thing we can be sure about: No laws of nature
were violated in this experiment.

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sp332
Right, so if conservation of momentum is violated, then it's not a law of
nature. That would be quite a discovery!

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ars
Considering just how fundamental conservation of momentum is, that would be
quite unexpected.

It's even more fundamental than conservation of energy.

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rsanchez1
Seeing how they keep failing to find the Higgs boson, I guess they felt they
had to do something to generate buzz.

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patrickod
I hope this is tongue in cheek as it's clear from both AP and BBC that this is
not a sensationalist release. Also note that the false alarm discovery of the
Higgs in CERN this year was not an official release and rather the actions of
a rogue researcher.

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rbanffy
"We have data that suggest we saw particles moving faster than light and we
are showing everybody the data because we must have made a mistake, but we
can't find it by ourselves after trying a lot" is pretty much sensational
enough for those who can understand the implications of the unlikely
possibility they measured something that really happened.

The odds are they made a mistake. But, if they didn't, the universe just got
much more interesting.

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xster
Battlecruiser operational

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spiffistan
Tachyons, here we come! Or maybe not.

