
New paper claims that the neutrino is likely a faster-than-light particle - kowdermeister
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-faster-than-light-particles.html
======
lkrubner
If true, this would explain the Fermi Paradox. If there is a faster-than-light
particle in this universe, then that is what intelligent life would use to
communicate. We can assume that aliens that are smart enough to reach the
level that they figure out what a neutrino is, would also, eventually, figure
out a way to use it to communicate.

Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I mean that no intelligent life form will
communicate with the standard parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which at
best travels at the speed of light, if there is a faster alternative. IF there
is a particle that travels faster than light, then it seems likely intelligent
life will find a way to send that particle in bursts, allowing at least as
much communication as is allowed by Morse Code. The point is, the universe is
very big, and the speed of light is very slow if you are trying to converse
with someone on the other side of your galaxy, or in another galaxy. So if
there is a particle that does move faster than the speed of light, it is
likely that intelligent life would attempt to use it for communication. This
would explain why the SETI project has not picked up anything yet -- they are
listening for the wrong thing.

~~~
CamperBob2
_If there is a faster-than-light particle in this universe, then that is what
intelligent life would use to communicate._

SETI-like efforts have a big handicap for a different reason. To oversimplify
a bit: any signal that is distinguishable from noise is a waste of energy.

Right now, in the name of spectral efficiency, we're migrating our legacy
systems (such as TV broadcast) to modulation formats that sound exactly like
white noise to a receiver that doesn't know the coding scheme... and never
mind encryption, which has the same effect. Other races will be confronted
with the same problems, and will use the same solutions, to the extent they
use wireless for medium- to long-range communications at all.

So, the only way we'll detect intelligible signals from an alien world is if
we happen to catch them between their development of communications technology
and information theory. This is a pretty narrow window -- only about 100 years
in our case.

If SETI has any hope at all, it will lie in detecting deliberate beacon
transmissions, not incidental RF. But some smart people have argued that
attracting attention with such a beacon would be a mistake, possibly the last
one the species in question ever makes.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Other races will be confronted with the same problems, and will use the
same solutions, to the extent they use wireless for medium- to long-range
communications at all."_

This seems a little ahistorical and antropocentric to me.

Ahistorical because even humans have avoided using certain technologies for a
variety of reasons -- from certain weapons (chemical/biological, cluster
bombs, nuclear weapons, etc) to pesticides, communications technologies,
certain programming languages, etc. despite their arguable technological
superiority or ability to get the job done.

Anthropocentric because, really, who knows how aliens would think or what they
would do? Your argument applies, if it applies at all, to species that think
and act much like us. It is debatable whether radically different intelligent
(a term which we don't understand even when we apply it to ourselves) species
would even understand something as "fundamental" as mathematics the way we do,
nevermind actually use technical artifacts in a way recognizable to us.

On the subject of recognizability, could bacteria recognize the humans that
they dwell on as intelligent or even living? Can they recognize anything at
all? As bacteria are to us, so we may be to alien intelligent life, or even to
potentially intelligent life here on earth such as trees, superorganisms like
insect or fungal colonies, etc. Organisms that operate at radically different
time scales or radically different ways of relating to the world.

Some have argued that the Earth is an organism with agency, or the Internet is
one. If that is so, how would we recognize these as such, how would we
communicate with them, if it is possible? And if communicating with these on
Earth is so unlikely, how much less the likelihood of communicating with
beings from other star systems or galaxies utterly unlike that of our own?

~~~
bdonlan
If they don't use radio technology we'll of course never hear from them - at
least not via SETI. So, when it comes to SETI being effective, the interesting
case is where the aliens are using radio technology but never advance their
modulation technology to the point where the signal is no longer obviously
artificial to an observer without knowledge of the coding scheme. It is of
course difficult to say whether this is likely to happen; however, it seems
contrived for a species to exist that is okay with using math and physics to
construct and operate high-power radio transmitters, but refuses (or is unable
to) use math to reach the next level of spectral efficiency.

------
Steuard
This article on phys.org appears to be taken verbatim from a press release
written by the paper's author, Robert Erlech. (Here's his website:
[http://mason.gmu.edu/~rehrlich/](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rehrlich/)) From that
site, here's a link to what seems to be the original paper:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804](http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804)

Just as a minor quality signifier, it looks like this paper is categorized
under gen-ph ("General Physics") on arXiv.org. That's unusual for mainstream
research: topics like this would usually be categorized as "High energy
physics" or "Astrophysics". I don't know exactly what criteria arXiv.org uses
to judge when a paper should be moved to the "general" category, but I've had
the sense that re-categorization is used as a (weak) form of quality control.

I haven't read the paper yet, but this is a truly extraordinary claim. It
would take extraordinary evidence (or at least a hint of such evidence) for me
to take it seriously.

------
tjradcliffe
I originally thought the SN1987A results--which show the neutrino burst from a
supernova in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud arriving at the same time as the
light, within error-would easily falsify this but forgot that high energy
tachyons approach c from above as their energy goes up, so for the 5+ MeV
neutrinos that were detected the velocity difference would be negligibly
different from c regardless if the mass is positive of negative.

It's a curious result, but I'd still lean toward consistent defects in the
data over a tachyonic neutrino, personally.

------
cbd1984
OK, how does this avoid breaking causality?

~~~
rosser
If neutrinos are, in fact, tachyons, our notions of causality were _already_
broken.

------
marcosdumay
Besides tachions, it's very interesting to hear somebody talk about the exact
mass of a neutrino.

------
omilu
From what I remember of physics, objects get infinitely massive as they
approach the speed of light and therefore require infinite energy to get to
the speed of light. Is this not correct anymore?

~~~
CurtMonash
That's an argument for why objects can't be accelerated to and beyond c. But
there's a loophole for objects that are already traveling faster than c when
they're first created.

------
SeanLuke
> The result relies on tachyons having an imaginary mass, or a negative mass
> squared.

Perhaps these two were mixed up?

~~~
mp8
I suspect it's meant to be negative (mass squared) rather than (negative mass)
squared.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Correct. Tachyons appear in dynamical equations with imaginary masses, which,
when squared, give negative "squared masses".

------
gatorek
This is an old hypothesis: [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-
ph/9810355](http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810355)

~~~
dalke
Which is likely why the linked-to article says "three theorists Chodos,
Hauser, and Kostelecky suggested in 1985 that they might be hiding in plain
sight – specifically that neutrinos are tachyons".

------
codezero
I am always weary of a sole authored physics paper, especially in particle
physics. Either he had nobody working with him, or nobody wanted their name
associated with the work, both raise red flags these days.

Direct link to arxiv paper:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804](http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804)

~~~
kefka
Instead of attacking the person who wrote a hypothesis about neutrino speed,
do you know who will be duplicating his experiment?

~~~
Bud
I didn't see the comment as a personal attack. It was merely pointed out that
the commenter finds papers with a sole author to be questionable.

As for "his experiment", if you actually read the article, you can see that
there apparently was no experiment; rather, the paper's conjecture relies on
analysis of data from other observations and experiments. So the answer is
that nobody will be duplicating the experiment in question, since it does not
exist.

~~~
api
"It was merely pointed out that the commenter finds papers with a sole author
to be questionable."

That's an argument from authority and/or consensus.

At the end of the day, only reproducibility matters in science. The problem
with using unreliable heuristics like "single author papers" is that it means
the findings of such papers are less likely to be tested or further
investigated by others. It introduces a strong herd effect bias into science,
which history has shown is not a good idea.

~~~
Steuard
History has shown that heuristics like this are a _fantastically_ good idea.
They've been part of science more or less since science started, and science
has accomplished an enormous amount. The number of bold, exciting claims that
are entirely wrong is far larger than the number of bold, exciting claims that
are even partly correct. Heuristics like "put less trust in single-author
papers" (among others) are _essential_ for science to actually make progress
rather than spending all its effort chasing mirages. Yes, sometimes an
important idea gets overlooked for a decade or two along the way, but the
alternative would be to accomplish nothing at all.

(Unless you've been a physicist at a major university, you have no idea how
many emails those folks get claiming to have quantized gravity or to have
proved Einstein wrong.)

~~~
tjradcliffe
As a colleague once put it, "I believe papers published by people I know.
Failing that, by people who have worked with people I know. In third place, by
people who are at institutions I know have a history of good work."

Science has a deep internal tension that drives it forward, because it is both
inherently elitist and necessarily public. If results are not published they
aren't science, because they aren't incorporated by the scientific community.
And yet while a) anyone can do science and b) anyone can publish, it is still
the case that c) the scientific community is overwhelmingly tightly knit and
fairly conservative when it comes to adopting new ideas, and the number of new
ideas that get generated is so high that this sort of heuristic really is
extremely valuable.

Sure there are lone geniuses. There are also lone nutjobs. It's not difficult
to guess which one predominates, and these sort of filters do a good enough
job of bringing the nut/genius ratio down closer to unity that we are always
going to use them.

------
qwerta
Neutrino is faster than light in the water. To decide about vacuum we have to
wait for another nearby supernova.

~~~
m0skit0
Neutrino being faster than light when both in the water doesn't mean anything
regarding c as a barrier.

