I’m sure all of you have seen the T-shirt or poster of Albert Einstein wearing a police hat with his hand up saying: “299,792,458 m/s… not just a good idea, it’s the LAW”.
Well, it seems that some neutrinos are breaking the speed limit.
My gut reaction to this is that this is probably just the latest false alarm of some experimental result that supposedly “breaks relativity.” These seem to happen about once a year if you pay attention to nuclear and/or astro physics. The last big “threat” to relativity that I remember was a few years ago when some experimental result supposedly “proved” that certain particles had to be moving faster than light for certain sub-nuclear events to occur. The “entanglement” paradox is probably the longest running “threat” to relativity that has so far been hanging out there since it implies that information might be able to travel faster than light if you exploit the entanglement of paired fundamental particles.
These things tend to pop up, stir the waters for a while, and then fade away as small adjustments are made to the measured speed of light (a very, very difficult thing to measure) and/or corrections are made to the experimental apparatus or some other thing happens.
Now, as it happens, I don ‘t believe that the Theory of Relativity is “absolute truth” any more than I think any bit of “settled science” is. I do think it’s the best approximation we currently have of the nature of the universe at cosmological scales. However, as I have pointed out here in the past, Relativity has a fundamental problem. Relativity is based on the premise that space-time is “smooth.” Unfortunately Quantum Mechanics is based on the premise that space-time is “fuzzy.” Both work, but both simply can’t be right. The universe cannot be smooth and fuzzy at the same time. Or there is no way to wrap a human brain around such a concept.
So eventually there will be some reconciliation of relativity with quantum mechanics, or else we will have to eventually realize that we simply can’t explain the universe in one theory that works on the smallest and largest scales simultaneously.
My guess is that Relativity will have to be adjusted or modified to deal with the fuzziness of the universe at some point. Quantum Mechanics is more or less based entirely on actual experimental results while Relativity is a grand theory based on fundamental assumptions about the nature of space and time. Relativity is, perhaps, the single most beautiful scientific theory ever conceived. It is a breath-taking intellectual achievement that demonstrates the incredible imaginative ability of the human mind. It describes a universe that is so beautifully engineered that Einstein once famously said “If the universe is not as Relativity describes, then God missed a great opportunity.” Or something like that.
But I can’t help but think that very beauty is the reason it is unlikely to survive the gritty ugliness of Quantum Mechanics without significant alterations at some point in the future.
11 users commented in " Speeding neutrinos… "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHeh, I seem to recall being virtually bit#! slapped when I styled science as the “last best guess based on the current information.”
The term “settled science” demonstrates nothing so much as the user’s inability to understand either the meaning of the word “settled” or the word “science.”
I read somewhere on Monday that the neutrinos themselves weren’t exceeding the speed of light, but the waves through the neutrino field (or whatever the medium is called) were traveling faster than light.
It certainly wasn’t authoritative, but it it introduced me to an idea I hadn’t previously considered, since I haven’t really touched any sciences since my physics class in high school lo those many years ago.
Boyd, I’d be interested in reading that if you have a link. I’ve been out of physics for decades now, but my recollection of modern physics is that there is no “medium” through which neutrinos, photons or other particle move through. In fact, if I recall my relativity classes (which is debatable) the very idea of a “medium” violates relativity since it implies a “special” frame of reference. The absolute bedrock principle of Relativity is that no frame of reference is special. What you are describing seems to me to be more of a violation of Relativity than the faster than light neutrino.
Let me restate that more clearly: my understanding was that the neutrinos themselves were the medium, and there was a “wave” moving through the neutrinos that was faster than light. Kinda like a wave in the ocean moving through the medium of water, so that the wave moves faster than the individual water molecules.
Is that clearer?
I now see that they were referring to an earlier experiment with photons with faster-than-light waves:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100126175921.htm
@Boyd, yes that makes more sense based on what I think I know of physics these days.
In modern physics theory there is no distinction between a neutrino “wave” and a neutrino “particle”. In physics this is known as the “wave-particle duality” concept.
A few years ago there was an experiment that seemed to show photonic waves propogating faster than the photons themselves. To put it another way, viewing photons as particles for a moment, it appeared that photons in front of other photons were getting some sort of “boost” from photons behind them. This created a bit of a sensation for a few months before an
equipment problem was discovered and the effect went awayan adequate explanation for the phenomenon which didn’t require faster than light travel was proposed.It sounds like this may be a similar situation with neutrinos instead of photons.
It is worth pointing out how incredibly difficult it is to track neutrinos. Neutrinos are very special things. To a neutrino pretty much everything in the universe looks like a vacuum. Billions of neutrinos from the sun are racing through your body every second, but virtually all of them pass right through you, your chair, the floor, the earth and the moon and Jupiter if they happen to be traveling in that direction.
So I am highly skeptical of any experiment that claims to be firing neutrinos from one source to a detector 500 miles away with any real sense of precision and accuracy. As far as I know the only “practical” (and I use that term advisedly) neutrino detectors are huge underground pools of water with thousands or tens of thousands of highly sensitive light detectors all through the roof of the pool. Neutrinos which (rarely) happen to interact with water molecules generate a tiny flash of light. So the detection that is being done here is almost certainly that sort of detector. For as long as I can remember those detectors have been plagued with technical difficulties as well as having to deal with the fact that neutrinos routinely travel through the earth and hit those pools of water from all angles all the time. There’s no way to “shield” them from one source of neutrinos and only look at neutrinos from one direction.
So color me skeptical…
Heh.. cross-posted your response and mine. As I said, I remember that earlier experiment.
Yet another example of my feelings on the state of “science” these days.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120907125154.htm
This latest “last best guess” will be eclipsed by another and, even then, I won’t swallow these crazy notions until they can tell me with absolute certainty whether or not bacon is bad for me.
Oh, and apparently our “junk” DNA ain’t so junkish after all… http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/06/junk-dna-not-so-useless-after-all/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29
Yet I’m supposed to believe that our scientists know how much matter exists in the universe, that there are other dimensions than those we can perceive (and to my surprise, there appears to be just exactly as many as are required by (fill in the blank) to make (fill in the blank)’s current theory work…), and that affecting one particle over here affects its twin particle over there even though there is nothing which connects the two and no matter how far the two are separated….
Sigh.
Heh Drax, this must be a real sore point to you for you to necro this thread from so long ago.
One of my main complaints with “science” issues such as Global Warming is that the “certainty” that is expressed (and blared from the mountaintops) is far beyond what “science” actually can claim.
Most real scientists understand that our current “knowledge base” is never any more than a “best guess” based on our current understanding of the data we have, and that it always is open to revision based on new data.
Too many “scientists” these days present their conclusions as established permanent facts.
Still, it IS our best guess at any time.
Heh. Just wanted to find one which was at least marginally on point.
And, I’m not really sure that much of today’s “science” is the scientific community’s “last best guess” as much as it is the last, best guess at what course of research will ensure continued or increased grants.
Well, I can’t argue with you there. The state of nuclear and/or quantum physics has become so politicized that it is virtually impossible to get grants unless you are doing “String Theory research.” It chaps my jaws every time I see the word “theory” used in this way. As far as I understand the scientific definition of the word “theory” I can’t see how “String Theory” qualifies as a “theory”. It provides no definable structure to construct hypotheses or test anything that is actually proposed.
However, that doesn’t mean all of science is poorly defined or politicized. I feel pretty comfortable with the broad framework of modern cosmology and the predictions of the equations of quantum mechanics may have no sound theoretical basis to rest on, but they have been proven time and again to work. We just don’t know why they work.
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