Neutrinos go trolling on

posted on November 21st, 2011, 12:49 pm

neutrinos interact with the rest of the universe on a regular basis. otherwise we wouldn't know about them, or better said: they would not exist, as only the observable universe does exist if there is something without causal relation to us, it does not exist. This mind sound confusing or strange to start with, but if you take the time and think about it - don't forget that there is no objective view of things, as we are always part of a system, the universe in this case - its quite wise to say so

So if neutrinos exist, they still cant be faster then the maximum speed of information propagation, as they transport information if they interact with something. So, in order to allow them faster movement, we would have to increase c, which leads to the problems I pointed out earlier.

posted on November 21st, 2011, 7:33 pm

A lot of people in the media and in the real world have taken this as "proof" that Science does not work. To be honest, from my perspective, that simply proves that they don't understand what Science is. The important thing to understand is that Science in general is not as definite as people like to think. Every formula, constant, and law is part of a process of refinement.

Basically, you make the formula, constant, or law to fit what you know. As you learn new things, you gain more information, and can therefore refine the theory, or even scrap it and make an entirely new one.

Example: At first people believed there were four elements: fire, earth, air, and water. Eventually, people began to break those elements down into constituents, such as earth being subdivided into soil, sand, chalk, lime, granite, etc. Then atoms and molecules are discovered, redefining our view of elements into the naturally-occuring elements from Hydrogen to Plutonium. Then as the atom is split, we see differences in Neutron counts, changing the 'law' to include isotopes. We also learn about nuclear decay, and the 'law' changes to allow elements to change from one to another. Then we learn about Quarks, Mesons, Bosons, Neutrinos... And I've only noted a few directions that elemental chemistry has gone down too. The amount of revisions that this one aspect of Science has gone through is incredibly complex, branching off in all directions.

Therefore, I believe all of the things we take as scientific fact is open to said refinement. We've taken e=mc² as concrete so far, but if this discovery with the neutrinos does "break" e=mc², then we will simply have to adjust to it's replacement formula.

No scientific law will ever be perfect, but we will continue to refine it to get closer each time.

posted on November 21st, 2011, 8:16 pm

A lot of people in the media and in the real world

Are you speaking from the perspective of a person living in US?

posted on November 21st, 2011, 9:15 pm

<- physicist

Actually we are not sure at the moment how much of the SRT is disturbed by the neutrinos thing... maybe adjustment can handle this, but we need failproof data before we go crazy

posted on November 22nd, 2011, 1:52 pm

Current Story: BBC News - Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result

Twice now neutrinos have shown evidence of breaking the universal speed limit.

I'm looking forward to the results from the other experiments trying to verify the data.

Wouldn't it be funny if the LHC instead of solving the problems it is setting out to solve, instead made more problems by breaking some old ideas.

Previous story: BBC News - Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern

I'm still waiting for the announcement that they made an error in their calculations.

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on November 22nd, 2011, 2:40 pm

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on November 22nd, 2011, 2:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The ICARUS team has just found that the energy spectrum of the neutrinos from the OPERA experiment were normal - i.e. that the neutrinos were not traveling faster than light (faster than light neutrinos should lose most of their energy).

Incidentally, the correction factor for the earth's rotation is around 60 nanoseconds (and that's how much faster the neutrinos arrived early): it will be relatively easy to correct for that measure to see what, if any, difference was actually observed.

posted on November 27th, 2011, 11:17 am

faster than light neutrinos should lose most of their energy

This is in fact the strongest argument against them travelling faster than light. Data from this event foresays the neutrinos to loose nearly 50% of their energy on the way to the detector from cern.