The latest report from CERN is almost certainly wrong. (See headline.)
Still, imagine if it turned out to be right …
We don’t allow neutrinos in here, said the bartender.
A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar.
Tags: CERN, neutrinos, physics, speed of light
Okay, that is a fantastic joke. I can’t wait to read it.
ACLS: How can I tell the joke until you’ve laughed?
Isn’t the issue in the joke the speed of sound, not light?
No, it’s about the notion that FTL travel means moving backward in time.
I’m not sure what is wrong with the report, physicists found something they couldn’t explain with 6 months of work and then announced that they have results that even they themselves are skeptical of. Neutrinos are tricky b*stards, I’m excited for what new (non time travel) physics comes from this.
The odds are still heavily in favor of experimental error. Though the pretty much uniform consensus is that they did everything known to control for such errors. As Finn said, neutrinos are slippery.
Neutrinos, they are very small. They have no charge, they have no mass, and do not interact at all …
“Cosmic Gall”, John Updike, 1960
-TP
BREAKING NEWS: The results have been confirmed in the strongest possible way, scientists at Endymion Lunaversity announced this morning.
Tony: yes, I do love that poem, and they do have mass. That was the result from the early 2000s, with the solar neutrino mystery. Flavor-changing neutrinos, from electron neutrinos to muon neutrinos, in transit, couldconly happen if they have mass. So thte mass is super small, like order eV, but not zero. I think.
Blake: how cam we really assign odds to whether a new result will pan out? Past experience? The weight of evidence? I don’t propose total uncertainty about whether we know things, but this is a new result. It will be confirmed, or the result will not be reproduced. I think xkcd notwithstanding, odds are not so heavily stacked as that. We have theoretical reason to think c is it. And, we have never clocked neutrinos before. Yes, as Phil Plait pointed out, the supernova neutrinos arrived in the time predicted. Which was still before the light arrived, due to photons having to work their way out of the center of the collapse. Hm. Was that predicted, or do we just have a model that gives that, after the fact? Hm…. That’s interesting.
Someone here will appreciate this link, I’m sure: http://i.qkme.me/3549uj.jpg
For the life of me I can’t imagine how it is possible to observe a single
subatomic particle (particularly one wihtout mass or charge) or measure a timeframe as minute as a nanosecond.
But of course Einstein didn’t say it was impossible for matter to travel at the speed of light, just that it would require an infinite amout of energy to do it. He also said that the universe can’t be infinite because infinite mass would cause it to collapse into a point. So no infinite universe, no infinite energy, no matter travling at the speed of light. But maybe neutrinos got a better lawyer.
Anomalous: I routinely measure times in the nanoseconds every day at work. Modern commercial oscilloscopes can resolve picoseconds.
Thanks Mark. I did understand that. It just seemed to me that the sequence of events could occur as follows (in non-neutrino time):
Bartender speaks.
Neutrino enters.
Neutrino hears.
(Yes. Few things are dumber than questioning the premises of a joke.)
Who’s there? Neutrino. Knock, knock.
Anybody know any bartender jokes?
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