Particles travelling faster than light

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From here:

An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles traveling faster than light — a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.”

Goodbye Einstein, welcome Star Trek warp drive, time travel and really fast Internet speeds.

Science is always changing: some things remain constant:

O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? Ps 8

 

 

3 thoughts on “Particles travelling faster than light”

  1. This may not be a first. I believe scientists at SLAC achieved the same result in their linear facility a few years ago by colliding streams of subatomic particles and recording the second in line taking a small leap forward (a lame layman description from me). Almost as interesting, other reserchers have virtually stopped light (laser) in a lithium plasma and restarted it at full speed, again. Strange things are happening in God’s creation.

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  2. Happened at Hadron, the new time-space port?

    Catching up to Quantum Entanglement where the state of one particle in an entangled pair changes results in the instant change of state of the other pair partner regardless of distance.

    Besides Einstein never said the speed of light could not be exceeded, he did set conditions, infinite energy required and resulting in infinite mass. So if you have a zero mass particle (possible?) then hyper-speed could be possible.

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  3. Besides Einstein never said the speed of light could not be exceeded

    I think he did, actually:

    The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time. This speed is approximately 186,282 miles per second. It is the maximum speed at which all energy, matter, and information in the universe can travel. It is the speed of all massless particles and associated fields—including electromagnetic radiation such as light—in vacuum, and it is predicted by the current theory to be the speed of gravity (that is, gravitational waves). Such particles and waves travel at c regardless of the motion of the source or the inertial frame of reference of the observer. In the theory of relativity, c interrelates space and time, and appears in the famous equation of mass–energy equivalence E = mc2.

    And note that, with quantum entanglement:

    it is impossible to use quantum entanglement to send messages

    So information is not travelling faster than light.

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