The speed of light may have been broken.

This experiment contradicts more sensitive observations. They are dependent on the GPS location finding service which in turn is based on a model of the Earth's deviation from sphericity and the US military's lock down of accurate positioning data.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/this_extraordinary_claim_requi.php
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...than-light-travel-discovered-slow-down-folks/

 

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Reading your first link, this is just confirming some measurements made at Chicago a few years ago. It isn't new.

 

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I would have to assume that CERN has access to the military grade GPS location data. Perhaps not universally but at least with respects to the locations they would need for this experiment. The distance as well as timing had been one of my primary concerns. I am willing to accept that they could have the distance down to within a manageable margin of error.

I am not entirely sure about the timing...

I did check out both of the above links and that brief review of the arxiv paper last night. Need more time with that.

I had another thought on the issue late last night but I need some time and coffee this morning...

 

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Yea, I think I was dividing by 60 rather than multiplying, and using the actual fraction of a foot light second instead of rounding... I was fair certain I had made some error...

Still that would be 60 ft in 60 nano seconds a second and their elapsed time was 30 to a 40% of that so the distance accuracy would need to be in the range of maybe 18 to 24 ft?

Edit in bold

 

I feel compelled to point out that light travels at about 1 ft/ns.

 

So neutrinos move at about the same speed as my car?

 

Thanks for saving me the time of reading it

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Umm... Well... actually the neutrinos were "picked up by giant detectors" -- what do you think those were?

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No, that is 60 ft in 60ns , not in a second. Why do you have so much difficulty with simple math?

 

Duh! I stand corrected once more. Like I said I needed coffee...

 

OK, I'll read it, lol.

 

Yes we were both rounding. It would be more like 0.98208 ft per NS and even that is approximate...

 

I'll weigh in with a few comments:

First, about 200 authors on the paper - wow!

Second, the distance between creation and absorption of the neutrinos is measured to an accuracy on the order of about 20 cm, according to the paper. But I have not reviewed in detail how that was obtained, and I'm willing to entertain errrors in that measurement.

Third, if tachyons were possible, one would expect flight-times far greater than c. But this result is only a tiny fraction above c. This lends itself to looking for systematic error as the explanation, rather than new physics.

Fourth, the speed of neutrinos was measured accurately to be within about 1/500,000,000th of the speed of light during the 1987A supernova: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A While this result did not rule out neutrinos being faster than light (because they arrived at the earthbound detector about 3 hours before the supernova explosion), the normal explanation for their early arrival is that they penetrated the exploding core at near-light-speed, while the shock wave took 3 hours to reach the surface and become visible light, subsequently detected. However, the neutrino speed could not have been faster than 1/500,000,000th the speed of light because of the great distance from the supernova to earth. This compares to the 1/50,000th variation [This is a tiny fractional change - just 20 parts in a million - but one that occurs consistently.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484 ] between neutrinos and photons being reported by the CERN group, about 10,000 times greater than the 1987a measurement.

Fifth, similar experiments elsewhere have not yielded this result.

Sixth, if John Ellis is willing to entertain that Einstein's theory needs overhaul, how can he be so certain that dangerous strangelets can't be created by collisions of Lead nuclei at conditions that don't happen in nature, other than in deep space far away from astronomical bodies?

 

Where does John Ellis (and he is not the president of physics btw) even remotely suggest that relativity "needs overhaul?"

 

Also, What paper?

 

Well dangerous strangelet creation by lead nuclei collisions can either happen, or they cannot. It's a 50/50 proposition, so it has a 50% chance of happening. Right?

 

Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now." http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wor...rs_neutrinos_that_travel_faster_than_spe.html

His statement seems to imply that he is considering that from now forward it does not work as thought, or needs to be "overhauled".

I noticed you did not comment on the first five comments I made. The 1987a argument against 'new physics' is apparently now being taken up by many others (or, more likely, I simply hit on it independently of several others).

 

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If we have no other evidence on the subject to the contrary, then right. So far, I have seen no evidence from nature or experiment on the subject.

 

You couldn't resist throwing that in, could you?

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His statement seems to imply that there needs to be better evidence if you're going to discard something that's worked perfectly so far.