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.
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.
For perspective, they are going about 14.5 km/s faster than light, which is going 300,000 km/s. That is about .0048%. Most likely an obscure instrumental error, but if it proves to be correct, it will definitely send a lot of theorists back to the blackboard.
How absolutely fascinating – in my lifetime I have seen Newtonian Physics supplemented by Quantum Physics, then string theory then the idea of increasing numbers of dimensions and the idea of parallel universes to explain dark matter. Now something which breaks the light barrier. As we get further into the story of the universe, it appears just as we think we know how things work, it turns out that there is yet more…
But doesn’t the Enterprise go faster than the speed of light in just about every episode? These scientists should know that science fiction always predicts and preceeds scientific discovery. Sheesh. Of course, figuring out which predictions are the true ones is a bit of a puzzler.
Silly banter aside and on another thought, how do they really measure this anyway? Can we get some of these brilliant people working on our economy instead? Because we could really use some brain power in that direction right now.
#3 I think the Enterprise uses the properties of ‘worm holes’ working within the constraints of E=mc².
The idea of getting these scientists to apply their skills to sorting out our money problems is a great idea, as opposed to just spending it!
But, but … I thought the science was settled! 🙂
Strictly speaking, the Special Theory of Relativity states that there is some speed limit for signalling between two observers that is the same in all inertial frames of reference, not that it must be the speed of light.
By the way, I posted this next Tuesday. The Yankees lost 3-2.
Hmmm, I wonder what kind of particles angels are made of.
#6 The prevailing wisdom has been that no information, matter or energy can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. This is based on the observation that no matter how fast an observer is moving light always moves at the speed of light. In other words if we are in a car driving at 80 mph and another car passes us that is traveling at 100 mph it will look, to the person in the 80 mph, as though the 100 mph car passes at 20 mph. The ‘relative’ speed is 20 mph.
With light this is not so. If a star ship is traveling away from earth at 80% of the speed of light and someone from earth fires a laser beam in the same direction, the laser light appears to pass the ship at 100% of the speed of light. In other words the relative speed of light is always the speed of light.
If some particles travel faster than the speed of light then our whole understanding of space and time must be revised. It is not just a change in the speed limit.
The physicists making this suggestion probably have messed up their calculations somewhere. For a physicist’s take on this, see here .
David