Keep in mind the CERN neutrinos are born in a machine of about 0.5 TeV beam energies. Supernovae are one of the most powerful sources out there in space today, but I suspect the energies pale in comparison. That may or may not affect the neutrino speed, but it may make some unsuspected difference in the experiment.
60 nS is what, an 18 meter difference? Could the conditions in the CERN apparatus cause some spacetime distortion giving an effect of this order? Is there some Casmir-like effect possible locally, giving the neutrinos an apparent head start? Keep in mind, they are not racing neutrinos against a light beam, they are doing precision timing against GPS-based timekeeping. The paper linked in the News version of this story gives the details of the experiment pretty well.
FTL Neutrinos?
Just had an interesting thought that might correlate the Supernova results with the CERN results:
Neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, but ONLY when they are passing through dense matter, like the body of a star or a planet....
The other possibility I can think of that might explain it is Heim theory's dimensional shifting. If the electrical and magnetic fields of the accelerator are powerful enough it's possible that they are shifting one of the dimensions of the Neutrino beam slightly. They still travel slower than the speed of light, but as long as they are in the accelerator (or passing through dense matter) they are shifted so that their "distance" dimension is effectively compressed.
In either case, once they leave the influence of the dense body or the fields of the particle accelerator and return to normal space the dimensional compression effect goes away and they go back to looking like are traveling at the speed of light.
The net effect of either instance is that the neutrinos make a "jump" somewhere along the way. It shifts the measurement of the average speed, but throws it off enough that we only get a 3-hour delay for a supernova because they were only traveling FTL while they were within the star.
Neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, but ONLY when they are passing through dense matter, like the body of a star or a planet....
The other possibility I can think of that might explain it is Heim theory's dimensional shifting. If the electrical and magnetic fields of the accelerator are powerful enough it's possible that they are shifting one of the dimensions of the Neutrino beam slightly. They still travel slower than the speed of light, but as long as they are in the accelerator (or passing through dense matter) they are shifted so that their "distance" dimension is effectively compressed.
In either case, once they leave the influence of the dense body or the fields of the particle accelerator and return to normal space the dimensional compression effect goes away and they go back to looking like are traveling at the speed of light.
The net effect of either instance is that the neutrinos make a "jump" somewhere along the way. It shifts the measurement of the average speed, but throws it off enough that we only get a 3-hour delay for a supernova because they were only traveling FTL while they were within the star.
Just a stray thought ... I wonder how well they know how GPS works.
High-end GPS units attempt to correct for bending of the radio signals from the satellite as it passes thru the atmosphere. L1/L2 band units have some calculations that estimate the effect, but I've seen them thrown off by 80 meters when the signals take an unusual path not modeled in the algorithm that makes the correction.
They probably do have the beam distance known to a matter of centimeters, but I wonder if the timestamps are being exploited correctly? Measurement of a 60 nS interval is child's play with modern equipment, but synchronizing two widely separated timekeeping systems to that precision is trickier. If they were comparing a signal from a laser beam to a neutrino signature the delay would be evident. Synchronizing two ultra-precise stopwatches offers new ways to screw up.
Even these researchers are offering their results with the admission that they are still looking for an unknown systematic error.
The experiment that would work is not very politically acceptable. Launch a "teensy little nuke" (quoting David Brin) into space would offer a chance to compare the flash to the neutrino counts by a direct differential time of flight method.
High-end GPS units attempt to correct for bending of the radio signals from the satellite as it passes thru the atmosphere. L1/L2 band units have some calculations that estimate the effect, but I've seen them thrown off by 80 meters when the signals take an unusual path not modeled in the algorithm that makes the correction.
They probably do have the beam distance known to a matter of centimeters, but I wonder if the timestamps are being exploited correctly? Measurement of a 60 nS interval is child's play with modern equipment, but synchronizing two widely separated timekeeping systems to that precision is trickier. If they were comparing a signal from a laser beam to a neutrino signature the delay would be evident. Synchronizing two ultra-precise stopwatches offers new ways to screw up.
Even these researchers are offering their results with the admission that they are still looking for an unknown systematic error.
The experiment that would work is not very politically acceptable. Launch a "teensy little nuke" (quoting David Brin) into space would offer a chance to compare the flash to the neutrino counts by a direct differential time of flight method.
But you would think any timing errors for GPS signal path variance to the two sites would average out over time. It is unlikely that any GPS error would remain constant over a long series of measurements. None-the-less Tom, you bring up a good point. I was also thinking on that line, but having an idea how today's signal compensation packages look makes me think they are good to go. However, that does not mean it is not a factor as you suggest. On that, I suggest to iron out the possible GPS error, is simply a matter of data set width.
It would be fun to build a neutrino detection station deep in the moon, since it needs so much shielding, and then fire the neutrino beam at it, as well as a laser. A 500 billion dollar project. (It would be nice to have a scientific station on the moon for all sorts of reasons. Too bad the space program is dying. And now we will never find a monolith while digging out the cavern for the station...
The nuke in space idea Tom has is a good one. Emits both neutrinos and the photons nicely. Cheaply. Good thinking. I agree it will never happen. But it would be fun to observe! Sigh.
Well, I suppose we can patiently wait for better measurements. I bet you are right about the GPS anomalies. That may be the source of the error, if it is an error.
And we can watch Eta Carinae in the meantime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
(Edit: typed neutron instead of neutrino - fixed)
The nuke in space idea Tom has is a good one. Emits both neutrinos and the photons nicely. Cheaply. Good thinking. I agree it will never happen. But it would be fun to observe! Sigh.
Well, I suppose we can patiently wait for better measurements. I bet you are right about the GPS anomalies. That may be the source of the error, if it is an error.
And we can watch Eta Carinae in the meantime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
(Edit: typed neutron instead of neutrino - fixed)
As an aside, I find it fascinating to watch this time lapse of SN1987A.
As the poor star dies and fades away, the blast from the supernova impacts a ring of material ejected a few years earlier. Astounding stuff.
I noticed a little flash of light I thought was intriguing. Picture this...the little flash is at the 11:00 position, if you pretend that the dying star is a clock face. Could flash be a companion, such as a large planet or brown dwarf star that gets slammed by the supernova material before the ring?
not that I support Heim Theory, but Alchemist´s explanation of Heim Theory seems to support my wild "hyperjump" speculation.Aero wrote:No no, not when they are origionally created. They hyperjump during the transitions from one kind to another kind of neutrino.AcesHigh wrote:maybe neutrinos are NOT faster than light (explaining the supernova results)
and yet, they arrived earlier both on CERN and on Supernovas (although not by the expected margin (by a long shot), on Supernovas, as if they were really faster than light)
so what can this mean? They made an hyperjump when they were created?
Really, waiting seems to be the order of the day here on talk-polywell, so we should wait for confirmation or refutation of the experiment. Of course, that's no fun, much more fun to speculate.
This has been on my mind all day, and granted I'm no Heim Theory expert, but the original experiment that calculated neutrino mass matched Heim's calculation to 9 decimal places, and the expected precision wasn't even but about 6 decimal places.AcesHigh wrote:not that I support Heim Theory, but Alchemist´s explanation of Heim Theory seems to support my wild "hyperjump" speculation.Aero wrote:No no, not when they are origionally created. They hyperjump during the transitions from one kind to another kind of neutrino.AcesHigh wrote:maybe neutrinos are NOT faster than light (explaining the supernova results)
and yet, they arrived earlier both on CERN and on Supernovas (although not by the expected margin (by a long shot), on Supernovas, as if they were really faster than light)
so what can this mean? They made an hyperjump when they were created?
Really, waiting seems to be the order of the day here on talk-polywell, so we should wait for confirmation or refutation of the experiment. Of course, that's no fun, much more fun to speculate.
If the data on the FTL neutrinos is proven correct then it tells us that we need really reexamine every aspect of what we think we know about neutrinos, and physics as a whole.
I still think that the neutrinos are doing some sort of hyper jump or dimensional compression along the way somewhere.
I would love to sit down with Burkhard Heim (if he was still alive) or Walter Droescher and see what they make of this data, and actually most of the data that has been coming out of CERN lately.
One thing is certain: We are living in interesting times.
(And in the back of my mind I keep hearing Colonel Jack O'neill saying "Nintendos pass through everything... No matter how dense.")
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kunkmiester
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It's in relation to the supernova check. the neutrinos get on their way shortly before the light does, and so arrives a bit earlier. It's been commented though that that's just a few hours before, whereas the check we want is for a burst a few years before. That's going to take more than just a few minutes googling to find.Please amplify that WRT the CERN results.
Evil is evil, no matter how small
Here is the CERN paper explaining essential details of the experiment.
"Measurement of neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam." I think it has the longest list of co-authors that I have ever seen.
They really are using GPS to sychronize atomic clocks used to tag the departure and arrival times of the neutrino packets, refined statistically of course. The paper goes into detail about measuring the baseline length, calibrating the experimenal equipment and detecting systematic errors.
At the end of the paper, neutrino speed .vs. neutrino energy is presented, but those results, while interesting, are not statistically significant.
http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
"Measurement of neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam." I think it has the longest list of co-authors that I have ever seen.
They really are using GPS to sychronize atomic clocks used to tag the departure and arrival times of the neutrino packets, refined statistically of course. The paper goes into detail about measuring the baseline length, calibrating the experimenal equipment and detecting systematic errors.
At the end of the paper, neutrino speed .vs. neutrino energy is presented, but those results, while interesting, are not statistically significant.
http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
Aero
Reposting a friend's analysis:KitemanSA wrote:Folks,
Neutrinos leave the exploding core immediately, the light has to fight its way out thru all that ...stuff.. before it can reach real light speed.
I suspect it all had to do with the density of the medium.
read the paper for yourself ..
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
summary:
The results of the study indicate for CNGS muon neutrinos with an
average energy of 17 GeV an early neutrino arrival time with respect
to the one computed by assuming the speed of light in vacuum:
δt = (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns.
The corresponding relative difference of the muon neutrino velocity
and the speed of light is:
(v-c)/c = δt /(TOF’c – δt) = (2.48 ± 0.28 (stat.) ± 0.30 (sys.)) ×10-5.
*with an overall significance of 6.0 σ.*
6.0 sigma - HOLY cow ..
Vae Victis
Perhaps our knowledge of "the speed of light" is off due to the "vacuum" data being in less than a perfect vaccum. I don't know. Does "dark matter" effect the speed of light but not the speed of neutrino? How bout trans/inter-galactic energy fields?Aero wrote: Please amplify that WRT the CERN results.
The reports all say "would have taken" for the light. Maybe they did something stupid like forgetting the curvature of the Earth in their calculation of the time it would take for light.
But to get back to the original point I was trying to make... the time delay between SN neutrino arrival time and the photon arrival time is most probably due to the density of the medium. ICBW.
Last edited by KitemanSA on Sun Sep 25, 2011 1:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
They built that beast of a collider in order to learn something new. The presumption of many was that it would find the Higgs Boson, but that was just the hope that it would find something old ... an idea that validated an old theory never tested to these extremes.
As R. W. Bussard once explained to me when I complained about the fantastic sums machines like the SSC would take away from other science, most other scientific programs are not intended to find anything new, but just to build incrementally on what we already know. Big colliders, in his mind, are worthwhile exactly because we have no idea what they will show. Later he had me make up a poster for one of the lab doors showing Fermi's quote: "No experiment is worth doing unless it has at least a 50% chance of failure."
So far, no Higgs, but I'd take FTL as a nice consolation prize. Very nice. Or a measurement that the machine performs a spacetime warp ... space itself is permitted to move FTL and maybe the results will eventually show us that .5 TeV is enough to do this. Nobody knows ... but that's the beauty because now they have a hint about the direction to look. We will learn something new, either new physics or a weakness in a timekeeping measurement.
As R. W. Bussard once explained to me when I complained about the fantastic sums machines like the SSC would take away from other science, most other scientific programs are not intended to find anything new, but just to build incrementally on what we already know. Big colliders, in his mind, are worthwhile exactly because we have no idea what they will show. Later he had me make up a poster for one of the lab doors showing Fermi's quote: "No experiment is worth doing unless it has at least a 50% chance of failure."
So far, no Higgs, but I'd take FTL as a nice consolation prize. Very nice. Or a measurement that the machine performs a spacetime warp ... space itself is permitted to move FTL and maybe the results will eventually show us that .5 TeV is enough to do this. Nobody knows ... but that's the beauty because now they have a hint about the direction to look. We will learn something new, either new physics or a weakness in a timekeeping measurement.