Really? A particle with some positive mass travelling faster than light seems to point blank refute a whole chunk of Special Relativity. Further, from what I understand, the experiment was repeated 15,000 times giving a statistically significant result.
Well, it’s not like the neutrinos were a lot faster than light. They only arrived 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected. I think they cheated.
I thought neutrinos were massless, and that E=mc[sup]2[/sup] only applied to objects with mass.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s assuming there isn’t some flaw in the apparatus or experimental design or some such. Something like that would be present all 15,000 times.
Photons are massless, and they still can’t go faster than c.
Physics - Neutrinos Have Mass They have mass. Just not much.
Massless objects, such as photons, travel at c in a vacuum and no faster. The claim here is that the neutrinos’ speed exceeded c.
Not that I’m buying this, by the way. I’m relatively confident that some kind of error will be found. If it isn’t then my computer will no longer work. 
Wait, I thought it was that objects couldn’t accelerate to c or faster, because then they would have infinite math. Doesn’t this leave open the possibility of something that travels faster than c because it has no mass (even though photons don’t either)?
But wait, aren’t neutrinos supposed to have an itty bitty eeny weeny teensy amount of mass? Just enough to account for their incredibly rare interactions with other particles? And have neutrinos always been doing this, or was it just this particular group of neutrinos?
I am so confused.
What would happen if you put them on a rolling conveyor belt.
I blame the Coriolis effect.
This will wind up being like the Pioneer anomaly.
The actual experiment’s site.
http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/
A pretty good BBC article.
The error is roughly 17 meters, so that’s bigger than the potential GPS error. And they tried it 15000 times. I got nothing.
Perhaps they were Type A personality neutrinos.
But…but…the speed of light is the law. We can’t tolerate these scofflaw neutrinos! Ticket 'em I say.
I am betting on some experimental error. If I understand correctly, neutrino detectors are buried deep in the earth. This puts them slightly closer to the center of mass for the earth. (Deeper into the gravity well). Time “passes” at different (SLOWER) rates as one gets closer to the middle of a gravity well.
This may or may not be a contributing factor, but my money ($200 xkcd dollars) is on the idea of an error in calculation or allowance for erropr sources.
If 15,000 trials were done using the same apparatus and calculation protocols, then you would get 15,000 repeats of the same problem.
Still, it would be cool… here is a link from one of my fave , obscure Canadian Prog rock bands…
- YouTube which looks at things from the nuetrino’s point of view…
I took a physics class about the nature of time, and I remember the professor talking about how if you had an object traveling faster than c, then causality would necessarily HAVE to be reversed for that particle to make any sense. It would have negative energy, and in effect, be traveling backwards in time. Unless all of that is wrong as well, this sort of measurement shouldn’t theoretically be possible.
I would also like to add that neutrinos can change flavors as they travel which means that they experience time, which means they must necessarily travel less than c, which means they have mass. The reason we know neutrinos must have a mass is because we know that they can change over time, whereas a photon is eternal (unless it gets absorbed by something)
C’mon. 60 nanoseconds? How doubtful is that claim? Like any of those scientists could push the stopwatch button that fast.
Their mistake is in using a wristwatch one of the neutrinos is wearing; of course it will show that they got there faster!
I will be the first to blame steroids.
Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that this holds up. Can we then transmit information into the past?