New Paper Claims Neutrino Is Likely a Faster-Than-Light Particle 142
HughPickens.com writes Phys.org reports that in a new paper accepted by the journal Astroparticle Physics, Robert Ehrlich, a recently retired physicist from George Mason University, claims that the neutrino is very likely a tachyon or faster-than-light particle. Ehrlich's new claim of faster-than-light neutrinos is based on a much more sensitive method than measuring their speed, namely by finding their mass. The result relies on tachyons having an imaginary mass, or a negative mass squared. Imaginary mass particles have the weird property that they speed up as they lose energy – the value of their imaginary mass being defined by the rate at which this occurs. According to Ehrlich, the magnitude of the neutrino's imaginary mass is 0.33 electronvolts, or 2/3 of a millionth that of an electron. He deduces this value by showing that six different observations from cosmic rays, cosmology, and particle physics all yield this same value within their margin of error. One check on Ehrlich's claim could come from the experiment known as KATRIN, which should start taking data in 2015. In this experiment the mass of the neutrino could be revealed by looking at the shape of the spectrum in the beta decay of tritium, the heaviest isotope of hydrogen.
But be careful. There have been many such claims, the last being in 2011 when the "OPERA" experiment measured the speed of neutrinos and claimed they travelled a tiny amount faster than light. When their speed was measured again the original result was found to be in error – the result of a loose cable no less. "Before you try designing a "tachyon telephone" to send messages back in time to your earlier self it might be prudent to see if Ehrlich's claim is corroborated by others."
But be careful. There have been many such claims, the last being in 2011 when the "OPERA" experiment measured the speed of neutrinos and claimed they travelled a tiny amount faster than light. When their speed was measured again the original result was found to be in error – the result of a loose cable no less. "Before you try designing a "tachyon telephone" to send messages back in time to your earlier self it might be prudent to see if Ehrlich's claim is corroborated by others."
Can't believe I'm finally the first! (Score:1, Funny)
Yay!
Re:Can't believe I'm finally the first! (Score:5, Funny)
You cheated using tachyons.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Detecting Tachyons Is Very Hard (Score:5, Funny)
If your test was successful, you see little reason to do the experiment, which causes the test result to not have happened -- which can make your co-workers quite angry with you. The frustrating nature of this type of work requires extreme dedication.
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This is why I always go back in time and kill whoever invented time travel this time around. Just stop it!
Re: Detecting Tachyons Is Very Hard (Score:2)
Re: Detecting Tachyons Is Very Hard (Score:2)
Not really that hard at all... (Score:3)
You just need a thiotimoline [wikipedia.org] target in your detector.
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The Brotherhood of Sleep [youtube.com]
arXiv.org link (Score:5, Informative)
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I suspected that there was an ARXIV somewhere at the root of things, which Pickens hadn't taken the effort to track down. Downloading it to read (because, like, everybody on Slashdot reads the fucking article as closely as possible ot the source, before making stupid, pointless and uninformed comments about it, like wanking onto the biscuit in the middle of the room. (Not sure how that woul
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Any positive mass, you mean. Imaginary numbers aren't positive.
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Well, since Professsor Coward has spoken, I guess all science should stop, our understanding of the universe obviously being entirely complete.
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not from your parents basement it wont!
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nothing postulated in the search for atomic energy violated the laws of physics "cough"
Isaac Newton would beg to differ.
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it can't break the speed limit of light
I would say that you misread Einstein, Dr. Powell. May I call you Mark? You see Mark, what Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster.
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Special relativity (a very well-tested theory) also shows that faster-than-light travel or information transfer allows travel or information transfer back in time. (The converse is obviously true: if you take five years to go to Alpha Centauri, and then go back four years, you've traveled FTL.)
Lots of people are rather attached to the idea of one-way time and having non-paradoxical causality, which means they don't want it to be possible to send information faster than light.
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How many times have we been through this, if it has mass, ANY mass, it can't break the speed limit of light, end of!
People assume too much. They assume "flavor oscillation" requires time.
"it can't break the speed limit" manages to pack quite a number of assumptions into one compact sentence.
We can't describe gravitation from even one solitary photon yet undeserved hubris is nonetheless palpable.
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In particle physics, a massless particle is a particle whose invariant mass is theoretically zero. Currently, the only known massless particles are gauge bosons, the photon (carrier of electromagnetism) and the gluon (carrier of the strong force).
The belief is that Neutrinos have mass. However, if they don't then, they are a W boson and can qualify.
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True! If it has imaginary mass it can't break the speed of light from above.
um... (Score:2)
If it brakes causality, doesn't that disprove it right there?
Re:um... (Score:4, Informative)
Two things:
1) Causality isn't necessarily a law of nature, so much as "the way our senses are wired to see things".
2) It is unlikely that tachyons have brakes. Cars have brakes, even bicycles have brakes. But probably not tachyons.
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Got any evidence for monotonic time? There are legitimate scientific theories that mean some forms of time travel are consistent with the laws of physics as we understand them.
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The part of thermodynamics you're referring to is statistical in nature, not absolute, and doesn't apply on the quantum level. It applies to closed systems, and one in which we supply something new (from outside, or the future) isn't closed. Suppose I had a time machine, waited five minutes, and then went back in time five minutes. Everything not actually moving through time would get older at the normal rate, and suddenly something appears.
The Wikipedia article on time travel [wikipedia.org] provides a few possible
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Now, if you want to argue that a law such as causality has only limited validity, you should at bare minimum be able to show that one can build a consistent model of reality without it
http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/ [utm.edu]
Re:um... (Score:4, Funny)
But if it were moving, you'd want to brake it, in case something breaks.
Hmm (Score:2)
A telephone to send messages back in time... but sending information back wouldn't change the time we are in now, it would simply cause a split, an alternate time line to occur, and nothing would change at the time we are in now.
Example: Sending information back to stop the assassination of Kennedy wouldn't change that fact in our time, its already occurred.
It would create a new time line, one of which we are unaware.
If multiple Universe, and multiple time lines exist, would changing a time line we could ha
Re: Hmm (Score:2)
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but sending information back wouldn't change the time we are in now, it would simply cause a split, an alternate time line to occur, and nothing would change at the time we are in now.
Did God tell you this? Are you time traveler? How could you possibly know that?
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None of the above, but to me it makes more sense than an entire Universe changing everything in existence due to data sent back in time.
Think of everything that would have to change, it makes more since it would split off to another time line rather than interfere with the current one sending the data.
We can't change "our" past, but we might be able to change "a" past, and would that really matter to us?
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since/sense of course.
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That's one idea, sure, but whenever we start talking about modern physics I really distrust "it makes more sense". There's plenty in modern physics that doesn't actually make sense that I can see.
Difficult to reconcile with SN 1987A (Score:5, Insightful)
In that supernova (the first observed in 1987 hence the name), the supernova was close enough that we were actually able to detect the neutrinos from it. The neutrinos arrived about three hours before the light from the supernova. But that's not evidence for faster than light neutrinos, since one actually expects this to happen. In the standard way of viewing things, the neutrinos move very very close to the speed of light, but during a core-collapse supernova like SN 1987A, the neutrinos are produced in the core at the beginning of the process. They then flee the star without interacting with the matter, whereas the light produced in the core is slowed down by all the matter in the way, so the neutrinos get a few hours head start.
The problem for FTL neutrinos is that if the neutrions were even a tiny bit faster than the speed of light they should have arrived much much earlier. This is strong evidence against FTL neutrinos. In the paper in question, he mentions SN 1987A in the context of testing his hypothesis in an alternate way using a supernova and the exact distribution of the neutrinos from one but doesn't discuss anywhere I can see the more basic issue of the neutrinos arriving at close to the same time as the light.
Mod parent down for peddling his crackpot theory (Score:2, Insightful)
Did any of you who moderated parent up actually look at the link posted? It's a personal website defending his pet crackpot theory of everything.
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The primary difficulty here is going to be the same data that was really tought to reconcile with in the OPERA experiment, namely the data from SN 1987A.
I had the same thought, but it turns out not to be the case. Given the model he's working with, the neutrinos will be as much above the speed of light as they would have been below it if they had the same real mass (0.3 eV or something like that.)
For ~10 MeV neutrinos this gives gamma absurdly close to unity, and it's as impossible to distinguish neutrinos traveling just over c from ones traveling at c from ones traveling just under c.
The paper actually mentions SN1987A and talks a bit about the time resolu
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Phys.org? Faster than light? (Score:2)
Dark Matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could tachyons be where the dark matter mass comes from?
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Dark matter, as observed, seems to hang around galaxies. This suggests that it travels fairly slowly, and can't normally easily escape a galactic gravitational well, suggesting that it isn't tachyons.
OPERA did not claim FTL neutrinos (Score:2)
What the OPERA collaboration claimed was that they had an anomaly in their data, which led to a possible interpretation of nneutrinos travelling faster-than-light. Since they found that a very extrordinary claim, they knew they needed extrordinary evidence, and after a few months of searching within, they opened up to the scientific community to help find their mistake, if any. They were very scientific about the whole thing, and didn't at any point claim "hey look here, we found neutrinos to go faster tha
Penny's eyes glaze over (Score:2)
I'm waiting for the next episode of The Big Bang Theory to hear what Dr.Copper thinks of this paper before I take sides. He's the man...
from my indium antimonide NMR experiment (Score:1)
REDUCTION OF OXYGEN CONTENT TO BELOW TWO PARTS PER MILLION WITHIN FIFTY KILOMETER RADIUS OF SOURCE AFTER DIATOM BLOOM MANIFESTS AEMRUDYCO PEZQEASKL MINOR POLLUTANTS PRESENT IN DEITRICH POLYXTROPE 174A ONE
SEVEN FOUR A COMBINES IN LATTITINE CHAIN WITH HERBICIDES SPRINGFIELD AD45 AD FOUR FIVE OR DU PONT ANALAGAN 58 FIVE EIGHT EMITTING FROM REPEATED AGRICULTURAL USE AMAZON BASIN OTHER SITES OTHER LONG CHAIN MOLECULAR SYNERGISTS POSSIBLE IN TROPICAL ENVIRONS OXYGEN COLUMN SUBJECT TO
CONVECTIVE SPREADING RATE ALZS
Meetup last week (Score:2)
For those interested in time travel, the inaugural meeting of the International Time Travel Association will be held at the Perimeter
Institute last Tuesday at 20:00.
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I was so excited I showed up twenty minutes early, but then waited around for half an hour and left disappointed after it seemed no speakers would show. My friends tell me they actually got the rolling at 20:25. Damn, they should be more respectful of other people's time.....
Going back in time is unlikely... (Score:2)
What is more likely to happen is that either a) no FTL particle, ever or b) the standard model will have to be amended. What makes some people think going back in time (and violating causality) is possible, is the elegance of the mathematics that fits what we know about physics. Would not be the first time that when more becomes known, the mathematics loses significantly in elegance. Just look at the mess of the current mathematical modeling (not: "foundation"!) quantum physics has.
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Sorry, but it is a mess. Sure, it described physical reality (as far as known) and that one is the source of th mess. ("Mess" as in "complex", not "mess" as in being more complex than needed or as in being faulty.) Once you have understood it, most mathematics are easy, but that is not an accurate basis for judging it. What is is the time end effort needed for a person to learn enough for it to become simple, or the percentage of people that can even get there.
My point is just that it is complex enough that
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Oh? And what about the ever-growing zoo of particles that _all_ need to be in there in order to get a complete model?
The other thing is that physics majors are extremely tough when it comes to non-discrete mathematics. I do not disagree on your stated numbers, just that I regard things that need this amount of time and talent as "complex" and as a CS person, anything complex is also a "mess" that any good architect/designer/implementer avoids. I guess we just have a different perspective, but I think I do u
faster than light time travel information relay (Score:1)
problems with the paper (Score:2)
I'm not a physicist, either. Maybe someone can clear these questions up for me.
The paper cites neutrinoless double beta decay as one of its six observations, but from my understanding this phenomena has not yet been observed, and experiments that have claimed to observe it have not been "disputed", but unambiguously discredited.
Also - from my understanding - previous theoretical work stipulated that the FTL component would only be found in internal reference frames via
Momentum of tachyon traveling at infinite speed (Score:1)
One of the strange things about a tachyon is that it can be traveling in one direction for some real inertial reference frame, and be traveling in another direction for some other inertial reference frame. For yet another reference frame intermediate between those two, the tachyon is traveling at infinite speed, yet has zero dynamic mass and a finite momentum of +/- i mc, where i is the square root of -1, m is the imaginary rest mass of the tachyon, and c is the speed of light.
The direction of the momentum
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Re:this report is inconsistent (Score:5, Funny)
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So, not only are neutrinos tachyons, but the whole thing is a formal phenomenon as well. Fascinating.
Re: this report is inconsistent (Score:4, Insightful)
Nor did the Opera team claim any such thing, they observed faster than light tachyons, couldn't find why they had got those results and contacted another team to ensure their equipment was faulty. People in those positions don't just make wild speculations with corroborated evidence.
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Complaints are better when you also tell us what the answers should be. How do you call a number when its square is negative?
0.645793919 [google.com] != 2/3, but it's reasonably close.
Re:this report is inconsistent (Score:5, Informative)
Six observations based on data and fits to data from a variety of areas are consistent with the hypothesis that the electron neutrino is a m^2_v_e = 0.11±0.016eV 2 tachyon. The data are from areas including CMB fluctuations, gravitational lensing, cosmic ray spectra, neutrino oscillations, and 0v double beta decay. For each of the six observations it is possible under explicitly stated assumptions to compute a value for m^2_v_e , and it is found that the six values are remarkably consistent with the above cited _e mass (\Chi^2 = 2.73). There are no known observations in clear conflict with the claimed result. Three checks are proposed to test the validity of the claim, one of which could be performed using existing data.
Re:this report is inconsistent (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm...according to my calculator, 0.33 eV / 510998 eV = 0.646 x 10^-6, which is reasonably close to "two thirds of a millionth" quote
As for the imaginary mass, let's say that some particle had 0.33i eV as its mass. Then if you squared that, you would end up with -0.108 eV^2. How is that not "negative mass squared" ?
There are lots of potential problems with Erlich's theory, but the ideas you chose to nitpick are not at issue..
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How is that not "negative mass squared" ?
A "negative mass squared" would be a positive-magnitude square mass, whatever that is.
You have the squaring backward - imaginary is the square root of a negative. But worse than that, it is completely ignoring the units. Square mass is not mass.
Re:this report is inconsistent (Score:5, Insightful)
drdread66 doesn't have it backwards, the original article is unclear in its phrasing. It should have stated that the square of the mass is negative, which can be assumed when it accurately states that the mass is an imaginary number. Another commenter has linked back to the original paper on archiv.org; I always recommend going back to the source for science reporting anywhere online. As Einstein said when asked about his thoughts on a one page summary of the theory of relativity from a local paper, "things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Re: this report is inconsistent (Score:2)
A hyphen between mass and squared would help.
Re:this report is inconsistent (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying "has a negative mass squared" can be misinterpreted more easily than "the square of the mass is negative." One person read it as intended, and another read it as "you take a negative mass and square it." If the wording was completely clear, that misinterpretation couldn't have happened. Different brains will associate the words "negative mass" as a complete unit while others will associate "mass squared" as a complete unit.
Re:this report is inconsistent (Score:4, Informative)
There is no way to validly misinterpret "has a negative mass squared" and then you proceed to misinterpret it?
"The square of a negative mass" is a positive number. The square of an imaginary mass is negative, which is what they are talking about. It is clearly possible to misinterpret this. Before someone cries out that an imaginary mass is nonsense, I should point out that imaginary numbers appear in several legitimate places in science. I don't believe the results of this paper are correct, but I'm not about to dismiss them out of hand.
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It is not a number, it is a number with units.
If you square an imaginary distance, you do _not_ get negative distance, you get negative area. Totally different, and an important one.
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If the only valid interpretation of "A B C" is "C of A B", then I suppose that "liquid motor oil" is oil for liquid motors, and "downloadable computer software" is software for downloadable computers. I learned something today... that you're an idiot.
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There is no way to validly misinterpret "has a negative mass squared" it clearly means "has the square of a negative mass" which is nonsense.
Translation: "I am ignorant of what this term means to physicists, and I declare my ignorance trumps their knowledge."
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This is a scientific paper being written for the author's peers, none of whom would ever misinterpret it. I've seen this issue come up in a couple of places where laypeople are confused by the language of physics.
This is not a problem with the language of physics: it is a problem with laypeople.
I'm all for clear scientific communication, but at the end of the day, communication is hard and worrying about how some random person on the 'Net might misinterpret a term you use every day in your professional work
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Actually, "mass squared" is a completely relevant concept in this context. The reason is that the equation everybody thinks they know as Einstein's special relativity equation is NOT E = mc^2. That is the simplified version for objects at rest. The version that includes particles in motion is E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4, where p is the momentum of the particle. Note the presence of an m^2 term in that equation. Thus, a negative mass squared -- which others have pointed out should be read as "negative (mass square
Re:this report is inconsistent (Score:4, Insightful)
Imaginary isn't "negative mass squared"
The sentence is slightly ambiguous, however;
The result relies on tachyons having ... a negative (mass squared)
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Why do people think FTL allows for backwards time travel? It's called Special Relativity, and is much more convincing than people's general ideas. p> Suppose you're in a spaceship traveling at a speed relative to another spaceship such that time dilation is 2, meaning that for each of you time appears to pass at half speed for the other one. When you meet, you exchange ansible (instantaneous communicator) settings. An hour after, you put your coffee cup on the edge of the console, and it falls and br