Ye cannae change the laws of physics

The last I heard was that a repeat of the experiment (early December 2011) had yielded the same results and the experiment is now going to be carried out in other facilities, although offhand I can't remember where exactly. I think one site was in the US.

The data has also been farmed out to be peer-reviewed, I believe.
 
I was thinking about this and had a crazy idea. I'm no physicist but...

As I understand it photons (light) are affected by gravity and neutrinos are not. This is why neutrinos can pass through enormous amounts of mass (like whole planets) without being affected and light cannot. This is also why the path of light gets bent by nearby objects.

So maybe neutrinos travelling close to the speed of light and unaffected by gravity can take a "shorter" route than light. So arriving early?
 
Faster Travel with Neutrino Coaches
Adding Mass to your Lightstream​
 
Vertigo said:
I was thinking about this and had a crazy idea. I'm no physicist but...

As I understand it photons (light) are affected by gravity and neutrinos are not. This is why neutrinos can pass through enormous amounts of mass (like whole planets) without being affected and light cannot. This is also why the path of light gets bent by nearby objects.

So maybe neutrinos travelling close to the speed of light and unaffected by gravity can take a "shorter" route than light. So arriving early?
Click to expand...
Likewise, I'm no physicist, but I had a similar thought. There are neutrino counters/registers (I'm not sure of the correct nomenclature) located in a mine in (I think) Wales. The project involved is trying to record neutrino bombardment from space.

So, my uninformed question is whether or not there is some sort of marker in regards to these 'Swiss' neutrinos, which I doubt very much, although it is an amusing thought imagining a graphic artist looking for a brush small enough:D. Is the experiment contaminated? As with your question Vertigo, I suppose it comes down to whether or not they can contain the neutrinos in the beam and whether they can shut everything else out.
 
Vertigo said:
I was thinking about this and had a crazy idea. I'm no physicist but...

As I understand it photons (light) are affected by gravity and neutrinos are not. This is why neutrinos can pass through enormous amounts of mass (like whole planets) without being affected and light cannot. This is also why the path of light gets bent by nearby objects.

So maybe neutrinos travelling close to the speed of light and unaffected by gravity can take a "shorter" route than light. So arriving early?
Click to expand...

I must say I've not heard it said that neutrinos are not affected by gravity before. I'd find it very bizarre if that were true as surely that would make it pretty much unique in the universe and one would have thought such a fact would have been mentioned more often.
 
It could be because they are electrically neutral (hence the name) and will not interact easily with other subatomic particles (allowing them to penetrate matter much more deeply).

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that, not only relatively immune to the electromagnetic force, gravity is extremely weak on a sub-atomic level and neutrinos have almost no mass.
 
Ah my apologies on re-reading I missed a comma :eek:. This from Wiki:
Neutrinos do not carry electric charge, which means that they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces that act on charged particles such as electrons and protons. Neutrinos are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and gravity, which is relatively weak on the subatomic scale, and are therefore able to travel great distances through matter without being affected by it.
Click to expand...
I had read it as : "... affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism and gravity, ..."

Wherease I now think it reads: "...affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, ..., and gravity, ..."

Although it does go on to say that the gravity is "relatively weak on the subatomic scale", I still think that blows my idea out of the water. Oh well.
 
That just means that it is weak in comparison to the strong and weak nuclear forces (which only work on that scale), but it doesn't mean it's any weaker on a subatomic scale than it is on a large scale :) Don't forget that photons don't have any mass at all but are still affected by gravity. The mass of the particle itself doesn't really come into it.
 
Yeah I know that's why I said it still blows my idea out of the water :). Incidentally the mass of photons is a little more ambiguous than that; I believe photons do "develop" a nonzero effective rest mass when inside a superconductor. Also I believe it has still never been proven experimentally that photons are massless, only that they have a mass less than some number (that get progressively smaller as the experiments become more sophisticated). Nit picking I know but... :eek:
 
Things get interesting if you take the view that gravity is simply the curviture of spacetime. The paths of photons appear to follow the curviture of spacetime which gives us the gravitational lensing effect.

If neutrinos don't hold to spacetime curviture than when travelling then that would be very interesting :D

Andy
 
I haven't really been following closely, partly because there seems to be little real news.

Repeats of the original experiment are still in the process of being carried out at CERN and other institutes. However, I saw on the news about three weeks ago that there is now a belief that a setting at the LHC* may have been slightly off, so the initial measurements may be invalid.

Basically, it seems to be a case of 'watch this space'.

*The report was pretty vague - a token mention of science before covering who's sleeping with whom in Hollywood. I might go and check Science Daily and see if there's anything there.
 
Einstein turning in his grave? I don't know. Everything I've read of him suggests he'd be sitting back grinning at the prospect of a new horizon opening up. Not to mention getting stuck into a good debate.

As to 'faulty fibre-optic cable connection', I think I heard a similar excuse when somebody forgot to set the VCR (yes, VCR, it was a few years ago). ;)
 
From that story:
Since their November result, the Icarus team have adjusted their experiment to do a speed measurement.

What was missing was information from Cern about the departure time of the neutrinos, which the team recently received to complete their analysis.
Click to expand...

which makes the following somewhat of an understatement:
"I think they were a little bit in a hurry to publish something that was astonishing, and at the end of the day it was a wrong measurement."
Click to expand...
 
Yes, I noticed that, UM which rather conflicts with earlier accounts which, if I remember correctly, reported them checking their results again and again before going public.
 
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