Faster than a speeding Bullet.

[Buleste]

This News from CERN and the LHC.

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists - because it seems subatomic particles have beat the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - were put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.

They will be discussing the result in detail in a conference at Cern on Friday afternoon, which can be viewed online.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

Caught speeding?

The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance - a tiny fractional change, but a consistent one.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.

"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

"And of course the consequences can be very serious."

Taken from BBC news website.

[Harrison]

I read this yesterday from the BBC news site too. Very interesting discovery that could discount a large percentage of current Physics theory.

Did you also read that they think they have the whole idea of dark energy and matter wrong too?

[Tiago]

uauu,
fascinating.

and this

Did you also read that they think they have the whole idea of dark energy and matter wrong too?

where can i read it?

[Harrison]

It is also on the BBC Science site here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14948730

[Tiago]

cool, thanks

here is a article from discover magazine about speed of light, and reasons why you should calm down... it could be ... not so true (?)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...er+Magazine%29

[Buleste]

Here's another quick article explaining how the scientists are actually asking people to pick holes in their results because if it is true then Quantum Physics and Particle Physics just got a whole lot stranger. One Physicist even said if the results are true then he will "eat his boxer shorts on live TV".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034414

[Bloodwych]

This one just might go on to join quantum entaglement and notched up as another "spooky action", although this one "over a distance" rather than "at a distance".

Who'd have though, paranormal activity in physics! Ghosts in the machine indeed!

Now get it sorted CERN; I want my time machine and anti grav board like they promised would be here by now in Back to the Future.

[Buleste]

Hell Sam Beckett has been Quantum Leaping since '96 so why aren't we seeing any benefits of that yet?