A hole discovered in einstien's theory of relativity

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The part where he said nothing is fasting than light in a vacuum...well acording to this article, they found a type of particle that is 60 seconds faster than light. Some say it has great implications in how physics is studied.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/09/22/p ... cientists/

Jojo

Not really. This will turn out to be just a measurement error. Even the Italians who worked on the experiment think so. That's why they've asked other labs to duplicate the results. Fermi has already done a similar experiment a few years ago and found neutrino v > c but the margin was so small (10ns I think) they chalked it up to a measuring error. The error bars were larger than the result.

This is called "Peer-Group Review"...


... and this is why it's a foundational principle of the Scientific Method.

Only among the ignorant is such an obvious violation of physics taken seriously without confirmation from other "Peer-Group" sources.

As I understand it, the difference here is that the margin of error is smaller in the CERN results than it was in the Fermilab results, and they have not yet been able to identify the measurement fault.

The jury's still out on this one--but the finding is robust enough for CERN to send it out to others and say, "We can't figure out what's wrong with it."

The trouble with this being an "obvious violation of physics" is that almost nothing in physics is definitively known to be true. We have a partial model of the universe that, so far, is internally consistent. But if we get an observation that is both accurate and inconsistent with the model, then we know that it is the model that is at fault, and which must be changed to accommodate the new observation.

At the end of the day, I suspect this will be found to be an error--but until that can be demonstrated we are still left to wonder.

That's why Peer-Group Review is nearly automatic before publication - sometimes the most important discoveries are not met with "Eureka!", but with "Hmm ... that's weird ... somebody wanna look at this?".

Among the Ignorant are the Mainstream Media Outlets who have jumped the gun over this announcement. There is a lot of work to be done to explain the result. Was it an instrumental error? Was the experimental design fault? Was there a physical condition or effect that produced the outcome that is not well understood or even unknown?

For example: When Uranus displayed motion contrary to Newton's law of gravitation the immediate response was to look for some cause for the strange motion. Sure enough, a cause was found. Another planet, namely, Neptune.

So this finding, if it is not in error may reveal the existence of an effect not hither to seen. Science progresses when its principles and underlying assumptions are questioned, re-examined and found wanting.

ruveyn

Exactly. However, I'm not yet ready to bet the farm that an FTL principle has been discovered.

Nor am I, nor are the people who did this experiment. They want confirmation to make sure they have not overlooked anything.

ruveyn

Isn't it supposed to be impossible for anything to hit the light barrier.

Actually ruveyn while it could be instrument issues, it is quite logical to assume that it is possible to go FTL.

If out of all the thousands UFO sightings, only 1 is extraterrestrial in origin, then the question is: How did it get here?

The odds of something going wrong on a long journey increases rapidly the longer the duration of the journey. The closest star is 4.3 light years away. All it takes is one UFO sighting of being real and extraterrestrial, and the theory of speed of light being the absolute speed limit gets thrown into question.

^ Not if the object has been drifting from Alpha-C toward Earth for the last few thousand years.

So What???

I've known that shadows can move faster than the speed of light all of my immortality.

Remember, science is just a big set of somethings abstracted. But those ones which are of any practical use for survival of mere mortals are the paradoxical issue.

Tadzio

Probably everyone on the spacecraft would be long dead.

Dibs on the ray-guns!

Dead from what?

Old Age, perhaps? Assuming that these imaginary aliens have similar physiological needs as our own, of course.

Was thinking of life support failure, radiation leak, any number of hazards.