This all relays on the value of [iC[/i being maximum speed and value these findings possibly throw that and therefore the whole relitivity(Sp) basis into doubt.
That is the point.

This reminds me of the value of education.
When I was younger, much younger, it was commonplace to see written in a public sh/thouse ... 'Kilroy was here'.

I once saw written in a sh/thouse in Doncaster Technical College ... 'Heisenberg might have been here'.
Now that is the benefit of education.

And in relation to these experiments on neutrinos, I would suggest that the scientists involved look closely at the transmitters, detectors, timing devices, the geology etc,etc, you name it, before they start trying to turn current theory on its head.
Which doesn't mean to say they are wrong, but they have got to have a bloody good case to overturn or at least amend what already appears to work.
Science is a continual refinement, so if they are right, we move on.

Where to ?

A better understanding of the Universe and what makes things tick.

As far as I know, they scrutinised the experiment repeatedly in minute, intimate detail for a helluva long time, before publishing the results (together with reams of data) with an open [irequest [/ifor the global scientific community to disprove them. So far, no-one has.

They aren't declaring "look everyone, we've achieved faster than light speeds", they're saying, "erm, our results are suggesting the theoretically impossible has taken place and we can't see how or why, and we're struggling to disprove it, can anyone help?"

As for the quote, I remember writing on the door of my university loo: "Vodka corrupts; Absolut Vodka corrupts absolutely".

It's usually clocks , sometimes bombs , with clocks on them

Yes I know they checked their results. I have watched the documentaries on this. Which doesn't discount making a continual mistake.
And yes they are saying we have achieved faster than light speeds.
Or perhaps they are saying ' we are achieving faster than light speeds ... unless someone knows different'.


In which case, they are not that confident are they?

My understanding is that over vast distances of space, measurements would suggest they are wrong. Since light from stellar cataclysms has reached Earth before the associated neutrinos.

Mind you, their findings are supported by some work that happened in the USA some years ago.

The flaw is that FTL travel violates causality. A specific cause under specific conditions ought to have a specific effect. Not only that, but the cause has to come before the effect. Science and repeatability are entirely based on causality, and since special relativity does such strange things to time everyday concepts like "before" and "after" don't really make sense any more. But a cause still has to come before an effect, and an effect still has to come after a cause.

Say it's midnight,and I'm flashing a torch sending signals to my secret Mars base. My guys up there will get my message in about ten minutes or so. If I wanted to send an object at the same time, and it went just slower than the speed of light, that might get to Mars about fifteen minutes from now.

Dally's on his spaceship, and he's flying by when I send the object to Mars. He's going at sublight speed but damn quick. He watches the object all the way. From his frame of reference it takes maybe twelve minutes. From mine, and the guy on Mars, it takes fifteen. But to Dally, his frame of reference doesn't matter with respect to the light. It sets off at midnight and it gets there at 00:10. It says that on my watch, it says it on Dally's and it says it on the cooker in the Mars Base Alpha kitchenette.

Now say that somebody's left the gas on in that kitchenette. It blows up at 00:05. It's that time on Mars, and it's that time here. For Dally, what time his watch says when this happens depends entirely on how fast he's travelling and in what direction. It's possible that for him the explosion and me sending the object happen at the same time, even though they happened five minutes apart. It's possible that the explosion happens before I send the object, even though from the perspective of me and Mars it happens five minutes after.

Just like I had an instantaneous gun, say we have instantaneous communications for our faster than light super advanced spaceships. Mars sends a message to Dally. Dally sends a message to me. I send a package to Mars. Mars Base Alpha has blown up by the time any of this happens. Paradox. I think.

I understand all that, I think the flaw in the original post was that the weapon was instantaneous, hence violating the speed of light limit and so making either the original statement invalid. Either C is a constant and measurable maximum speed, or it's not. The battle scenario assumes that >C speed is possible, and so surely the relatavistic speeds are irrelevant to what is happening outside the ships.

If the ships are travelling faster than light, then each ship won't see that the other has fired, as the light from the weapon will be left behind by FTL travel, and so the idea falls to bits.

I've just remembered I read a novel that dealt with the impossibilities of space warfare fairly recently, damned if i can remember what it was though, but the bottom like was that the only way to hit a ship travelling at speeds close to those of light was to blanket every inch of space that the opposing ship could turn into, an impossible condition as the ship that was firing would actually have no idea where the other ship was, as it could have turned or slowed and accelerated any number of times before they were even 'seen'. I do love 'hard SF' even though it makes my brain bleed.

But isn't it that that's in doubt here? If greater than c is possible then upper limits on speed, at least according to current understanding, become irrelevant, and would tend towards instantaneous at the kind of distances me or Dally can keep a steady aim at.

I'm sure there's some notion of instantaneous over great distances in quantum theory too. But I don't get any of that. At all.



The Forever War? Ages since I've read it so not sure myself, but wars across interstellar distances and time dilation are the main plot elements. Excellent book, with sequels that aren't sequels which I haven't read yet.

Not really. To "disprove them" suggests you accept they appear to have "proved" something. Not even they suggest that. Basically they have put their findings out for peer review, and for other scientists to have a go and test them.

And there has been something of an avalanche of scientists putting forward reasons why the basic premise ("the neutrinos travelled faster than light"icon_wink.gif is not true.

Also, such is the area of controversy with the experiment, that of the scientists running it, 15 of them actually refused to sign the published document. That's people from within the tent peeing out.

Yes it must be a bit of a dilemma for the scientists involved.
On the one hand, to be associated with this discovery if true would be great.
On the other to dive headlong in and be shown to be a fool if it was found to be unscientific and missing what proved to be a fundamental error would not be great.
After all it is almost inconceivable that a particle can go faster than light, even though light has particle-wave duality.

What gets me is that they are basing these experiments on what is after all a distance that is peanuts compared to the distance light can travel in one second.
It takes, even by my crude calculations, 0.0024 seconds for light to travel 450 miles at 186,000 miles per second.
And they are saying that the neutrinos get there 0.00000006 seconds faster.
Now is any transmitting device, any receiving device, even when coupled up to eliminate lag capable of giving accurate results to these specs? Not reproducible ones, but absolutely accurate ones?
It's asking a lot.
This is more, to my way of thinking, a verification of the of the limit of speed than anything else, within experimental error.
These guys are no mugs, so you presume they know what they are doing.

Grovelling apologies for use of the word 'disprove'.


Have any of those reasons been proven? Everyone, including the original team, has been trying to explain the results or find a flaw with the experiment and the data since the news was released. As far as I'm aware the results still stand and have even been repeated under tightened conditions (20 events over 10 days, using pulse bunches only 1-2 nanoseconds long arriving 60 nanoseconds early), although of course years of further tests and scrutiny lie ahead.


That's 15 out of around 200 scientists. 4 of whom have now signed the more recent paper. Admittedly, 4 others have now not signed, still leaving 15 names absent. These people know far more about it than the whole of RLFans combined, many times over and while we can discuss it as laymen, they're operating on a level we probably can't even truly perceive.

It would be a fantastic discovery but quite rightly doubt remains even in the face of strong data. As one scientist at OPERA said, "People are exhausted. Everyone should be convinced that the result is real, and they are not."

Don't drag yourself down so much! I suggest that the perfectly valid possible explanations, such as a dimensional detour by the neutrinos, ought to be addressed and responded to by the team for starters. There are very eminent and very reasonable theories about what is happening and it would be odd if the team put their fingers in their collective ears instead of applying their massive brains to such possible explanations.

And whilst I have a healthy respect for such geeks, there are lots of geeks and boffins outside the team. One of which was Einstein. Are they cleverer than him? And I don't actually see anybody - as in nobody at all - siding with the team. One chap who seems to know a lot about it is Prof Jim al Khalili (of BBC fame) and he says if it is proved right then he will eat his shorts on public TV. From a boffin, that's a pretty startling vote of no-confidence!

Anyway, leaving aside fancy talk of extra dimensions and leaps out of the Universe, the sad and unglamorous fact is that some experimental error is most likely at the bottom of it, as per Occam. One chap with perhaps a fondness for Occam's razor has now published his own findings on the experiment:


Now I don't profess he's right, necessarily or this makes the team necessarily wrong. But they got some explaining to do once they get their collective braincells round that one. It sounds a whole lot more likely than the entire laws of physics being disproved.

Mind you what always comes out when you are digging around these subjects is any number of useless but neat factoids. Such as, if you have an average size thumbnail, approx. 100 billion neutrinos whiz through it every second of your life.

I don't think that survives Occam either tbh. AFAIK the root of what he says is that they didn't account for all the frame of reference errors from the relative motion of the satellites and the earth. But GPS itself does that. The whole system is based on time signals, and microsecond-scale errors mean inaccuracies of multiple hundreds of feet. I'm not sure what kind of scale a timing error of 60ns would entail, but I'm guessing distances larger than that required for military grade uses of GPS.

It may be that there are some other fundamental issues with the GPS time signals, but it's the standard that international atomic time (TAI) is built on and we have a whole host of interesting problems if that's the case.

Also, I'd be astonished if GPS was their only time source.

People once thought the world was flat, they were wrong. People once thought E=mc2, they were wrong too.

Two wrongs don't make a right.
Sorry I couldn't resist.......

My money is still on experimental error TBH. Right up until the point that another team manages to duplicate their results.

I hope they've stripped whatever down and put it back together. My money is on an 18m coax cable with a kink in it that that should be 1m long and marked "break this and I break you".

I liked the way The Forever War dealt with fighting battles in space at near to light speed and over great distances. The ships computers tried to predict the likely course of other ships and their munitions rather than flooding areas of space with ordnance. That scenario seems more reminiscent of Peter F Hamilton.

Forever Peace is a not a sequel but similar in style in that it is told in the first person and central character is a soldier in the future. Like The Forever War, it won a stack of awards.

Forever Free is a sequel to The Forever War and tells the story of William Mandela and other veterans disenchantment with life on the Planet of Middle Finger where they settled at the end of the war.

I think just duplicating the results would be hard for another team.
I'm thinking not just another team using the same gear, but another team with different gear preferably elsewhere. Because they couldn't trust the current set-up.
That would probably be hellishly expensive and for what?
They could rejig the current set-up I suppose.

They would have to come to the same percentage difference, or thereabouts,for there to be a match. Otherwise even if they may have indicated that the neutrinos were faster, it would look like an instrument characteristic problem that was playing a part in it.
And it's difficult to see how two or more different sets of gear would agree perfectly anyway.

I'm glad it's not my problem, still we can carry on with laws that seem to have worked so far and spend the money on famine relief ... naah! we can't do that, man is just too damn curious.

It does indeed, but the (alleged) error seems to be in the fatal assumption that their timing clocks were stationary. It is easy to think your clocks at each end of the experiment are staironary, but in fact they are not; the readout appears on the clocks, but the measurements rely on a moving satellite. The clocks' synchronizing reference point is located not where the clocks are, but in orbit.


Using the altitude, orbital period, inclination to the equator and other metrics, van Elburg calculates the error rate:


He hasn't published this formally as yet, and of course it will then go to peer review. But I like it.

It's a good job we are, or we'd be stuck in the dark ages. Cutting edge physics research is one of the very last areas that should be facing a funding cut.

Very interesting and I hope correct.
Relativity fights back, how poetic that would be.

They (the OPERA scientists) can't have overlooked this possibility can they?

OPERA ... it ain't over until the fat lady sings.

They'll be close enough to Dignitas to do the decent thing if it is correct.