If the recent developments at CERN end up being true (i.e. it turns out that something CAN travel faster than light), then what's to stop us from communicating faster than the speed of light? All this time I've heard that one of the limitations of QT is that information can't be transmitted faster than light. Could this prove that wrong? Also, if it turns out that the speed-of-light-limit is false, then could that also mean that other barriers to teleportation of macroscopic objects could also prove to be surmountable? How long before we find violations of the HUP or the second law of thermodynamics? Those are considered fundamental limitations, too, just like the speed of light may have been.
areasys, if true, it's much worse than that. All of physical observation to date is consistent with the framework of relativistic quantum field theory being true, which is that space-time has a certain structure of cause-and-effect and that it supports fields of particles in that space-time. Even through this framework supports faster-than-light phenomena, a mathematical theorem of this framework says changes to the quantum fields propagate only at speed c. This means while particles may move faster, slower or at the speed of light, observed signals cannot move faster than the speed of light. Faster-than-light particles, if they exist, in this framework, can carry energy and momentum, but must have a property of non-localization so that they cannot be used to send signals faster-than-light. Also, low-energy particles must travel faster than high-energy particles. Also the mass-squared must be negative. And if not all of that is true, then neutrinos just don't obey the laws of physics as we understand them -- they would be super-natural relative to the reality we do understand and would require a completely new and superior model to hold both neutrinos and the rest of physics in a common framework. And that's the only way physics would make progress, because the history of physics has, since Newton, been about unification in theory -- there is only one universe, and its parts should have some common organizing principles. But, neutrinos are not magic. Their existence was predicted from the reliable known laws of physics being inconsistent with energy and momentum studies with some types of particle decay. Their electroweak properties are well-modelled by reliable known laws of physics. So it is widely held that neutrinos are well described by the general framework of relativistic quantum field theory. And we don't have good evidence that they are magic or that all of the predictions of them being faster-than-light are in evidence. Further, more sensitive observations over much longer distances contradict these current results. http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/this_extraordinary_claim_requi.php http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...than-light-travel-discovered-slow-down-folks/ It seems simpler to believe at this point is someone mismeasured an angle or the curve of the Earth, or ignored, double-counted or got the sign wrong on one of the corrections needed because the Earth is an inertial environment, nor is it homogenous and spherically symmetrical, and the end points of the experiment are in relative motion. But you should join us in the main discussion thread for this topic: http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=110051
