Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? CERN Scientists Say No, Refuting Earlier Finding

GENEVA -- European researchers said Friday they have measured the speed of neutrinos and found the subatomic particles don't travel faster than light after all, refuting another team's measurements that prompted widespread disbelief among scientists last year.

Scientists with the rival OPERA experiment said in September that their tests appeared to show neutrinos speeding faster than light, a feat that goes against Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity which underlies much of modern physics.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Carlo Rubbia said his team, called ICARUS, used a similar experiment to trap neutrinos fired from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Switzerland to a detector hundreds of miles (kilometers) away in Italy.

"It's a perfectly straightforward experiment, very clean," Rubbia told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "The results are very convincing, and they tell us essentially that there was something not quite right with the results of OPERA."

Einstein's famous theory of relativity – a pillar of modern physics – says the speed of light in a vacuum, approximately 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), is the ultimate speed limit and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

That speed factors into everything from estimates about the size and age of the universe to the radius of black holes to the power generated by nuclear reactors.

Doubts about the OPERA results were heightened last month when it was announced that researchers had found a flaw in the technical setup that could have distorted the experiment's figures.

Antonio Ereditato, a member of the OPERA team and the head of the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics in Bern, Switzerland, said he welcomed the latest results.

"These results are in line with our recent findings about the possible misfunctioning of some of the components of our experimental setup," he told the AP in an email.

Asked whether he was disappointed that the prospect of breaking light speed likely remains in the realm of science fiction, he said: "This is the way science goes. What matters is the global progress of scientific knowledge."

The ICARUS team's results came from a trial run for a longer experiment planned to take place in April or May. OPERA, too, will repeat their experiment, this time with the technical glitches ironed out.

"The evidence is beginning to point toward the OPERA result being an artifact of the measurement," CERN's Research Director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement.

"Whatever the result, the OPERA experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny, and inviting independent measurements."

The ICARUS team confirmed that, as Einstein predicted, neutrinos travel at the speed of light.

"I'm not displeased that Einstein was right again," said Rubbia.

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Comments

[JackWhistle]

04:26 AM on 03/20/2012

Meh? When the initial findings were displayed, the scientists straight up said that their equipment wasn't sensitive enough. This is the anti-climatic ending.

[phal4875]

04:58 PM on 03/19/2012

This is still puzzling. I thought that nothing with mass could attain the speed of light, that only particles with no mass, such as photons, could move that fast. Neutrinos appear to reach light speed in spite of having a very, very small mass.

[SwiftJonathan]

10:21 PM on 03/19/2012

They don't, but the do come very close to the speed of light if their energy is very high.

[SwiftJonathan]

04:40 AM on 03/19/2012

One would wish the general public could learn something from this... but I am afraid that the general public won't. They usually don't even learn the way less subtle lessons reality can teach, so why would they learn from such a peculiar scientific curiosity as the measurement errors of a highly non-trivial high energy physics experiment?

[Social Construct]

03:21 AM on 03/19/2012

I wish I had the intellectual capacity to wrap my brain around these sorts of things. However, as challenged as I am over such endeavors, I'm sure glad that we have people working on such wonders. Beats having some self interested group telling me to ignore our evolving curiosity and the improving science to investigate and be happy with thousands of years old head-in-the-sand explanations.

[oneeasyrider]

03:11 AM on 03/19/2012

There may be an inherent contradiction to anything moving faster than speed of light. It's possible or even likely, (universe demands balance in all things)...time would reverse or backtrack.

If acceleration beyond SOL is a possibility, then it follows, whatever is moving beyond SOL exists in a different reality (our past)...counter to our frame of time reference.

In other words, if something is moving in time regression and it's momentarily in 1977, for example...there's no possible way to detect it's presence. Even now, energy moving retrograde faster than SOL would only instantaneously appear before disappearing...be strange and elusive like dark energy.

Further, as the energetic (whatever) continued accelerating beyond SOL (in time regression), it might also be expected to gain mass and somehow be connected to elusive and minimally detectable dark matter.

[SwiftJonathan]

04:17 AM on 03/19/2012

"It's possible or even likely, (universe demands balance in all things)...time would reverse or backtrack."

Only in the system moving faster than light, not in an external observer system. If the system moving faster than light is microscopic and has sufficiently few internal degrees of freedom and is sufficiently isolated from the rest of the universe, that would even be perfectly physical. Nothing spectacular would happen as the microscopic equations of motion are time reversal invariant, anyway. Therefore, such a particle would merely not be in possession of a particularly good local clock, or one, that can go backward in time and it couldn't tell the difference.

In my opinion, the rules of quantum field theory basically allow for such violations all the time, at all scales... it's just a matter of how well "prepared" the initial state of the fields are. I would venture to guess that one can quite easily make the time run backwards in any "bubble" of spacetime (even microscopic ones), but isolating it sufficiently from the rest of the universe and by preparing a state that equates to a macroscopic clock state with backwards running solutions.

This has, by the way, been done already with classical waves, be they mechanical or electromagnetic. These experiments just don't equate to much more than lab curiosities as the global clock of the universe can not be turned around.

[SwiftJonathan]

04:37 AM on 03/19/2012

Oops... that was meant to be "(even MACROSCOPIC ones)", of course. It happens in microscopic ones all the time, anyway. Virtual antiparticles do just that... appear to be running backwards in time.

[oneeasyrider]

09:58 AM on 03/19/2012

Good to have your input, SJ. "Antiparticle" is a good reference.

Know there are at least two possibilities to the contradiction.

First....large scale (macroscopic) reality beyond speed of light doesn't exist.

Second...macroscopic reality does exist, but requires a buffer from our reality to avoid cancellation (likely making the antiparticle undetectable)...in the same way antimatter can't interact with matter to avoid annihilation, even though detectable.

[demotom]

11:04 PM on 03/18/2012

The good thing about science is the fact that all findings are subject to confirmation. This is in contrast to religion where all findings are subject to anything but confirmation. When the results of any given experiment are shown to be in error we all learn from the experience. When the results of some religious based thing is called into question the Catholic Church has been known to burn people at the stake on charges trumped up by those who claim to speak to and for God. There is a distinct difference between religion and science. Religion is based on hearsay, while science is based upon indisputable fact. The scientists who mismeasured the neutrino velocity as being greater than the speed of light will not be burned at the stake.

[BannedInBoston]

10:51 PM on 03/18/2012

What always bothered me about the initial findings was that the neutrinos only traveled a very teensy bit faster than light. That really made no sense....

[phal4875]

05:01 PM on 03/19/2012

Fanned. That is an excellent point. A slight improvement on the speed of light implies bad measurements more than a change in basic physics. I am still trying to figure out why neutrinos, particles with a small mass, can travel as fast as light. I have long thought that only particles lacking mass can move that fast. Photons would qualify.

[RichieB]

01:18 PM on 03/17/2012

Order in the universe has been restored, once again.

[jackstpaul]

04:08 AM on 03/17/2012

Isn't it true that Einsten didn't say nothing could travel faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum) but rather that nothing could accelerate past the speed of light?

Isn't it also true that relativity and quantum mech can't both be correct under Einstein's theories? His unfulfilled search for a "unified field theory" still has not been fuflilled. Hence, he's wrong somewhere.

It is true that what we really know of the "universe" --in the aggregate global "everything"--is incomplete and might always be so. It's also true that there could be dimensions of which we don't yet know--and that is an endless possibility and unknowable--which is where some causal effects occur, with us witnessing outcomes we ascribe (inaccurate) casuality to according to the limites of our extant conception of reality, such that things we believe re: physics might be grossly mistaken given our ignorance.

I don't think it's a matter of whether Eisnten is right or wrong, per se, but of how "right" he was. Wasn't Newton in fact "wrong" about many things, though his explanations were on the right track, were "close enough" for many technical, practical purposes, and seemed correct on the more limited scope and scale of his era's knowable world, until Eintein came along and showed Newton to be "wrong" about many things?

Einstein might be "close enough" for many present purpoes, but obviously, until QT and R are reconciled, there must be major errors or inaccurate explanations in his theories--plural.

[Genders]

05:18 PM on 03/17/2012

True enough. We don't know everything and there are fundamental incompatible theories as the very foundation of our modern science.

That's what makes it exciting.

Check out this thoery that reconcils QY and R:

""Collective Electrodynamics" approach to electromagnetism

"Carver Mead has developed an approach he calls Collective Electrodynamics in which electromagnetic effects, including quantized energy transfer, derived from the interactions of the wavefunctions of electrons behaving collectively.[5] In this formulation, the photon is a non-entity, and Planck's energy–frequency relationship comes from the interactions of electron eigenstates. The approach is related to John Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, to the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and to Gilbert N. Lewis's early description of electromagnetic energy exchange at zero interval in spacetime."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead#.22Collective_Electrodynamics.22_approach_to_electromagnetism

He has a great little book out about it, he's the best hard tech writer I have ever read.

[jackstpaul]

11:39 PM on 03/18/2012

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out.

[rilyn]

03:04 PM on 03/18/2012

There is no problem with Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity, where the speed of light limit is derived. In fact, both are needed to construct the Standard Model which explains the Electro-Weak and Strong Forces.
General Relativity and Quantum Mechancs aren't fully compatible though...

[jackstpaul]

11:40 PM on 03/18/2012

OK. Great. Thanks for the info.

[SwiftJonathan]

03:04 PM on 03/19/2012

General relativity and quantum mechanics may actually be considered fully compatible, as they act on vastly different scales. What is not meaningful is the program to unify gravity with the other forces. That program has failed, and not because people weren't smart enough about it. There seems to be a fundamental difference between gravity, which is a macroscopic force and electroweak and strong forces, which are microscopic. The latter are expressed by dimensionless coupling constants, gravity is not. Even naively this hints at the possibility that gravity is fundamentally different. More importantly, though, gravity shows condensation effects at the largest of scales, just like many thermodynamic phenomena. Black holes, for instance, can indeed be thought of as a macroscopic spacetime condensate. This thermodynamic view of gravity is greatly supported by recent (about a decade) old insights into the thermodynamic form of Einstein's equations, which can be interpreted as an equation of state. This would make gravity a macroscopic remnant of a field theory (like Van-der-Waals forces, for instance). As such it would not have a meaningful quantisation, it will not exist as a QFT on small scales but only show up on scales large enough that will allow a classical treatment of spacetime. From that it would follow that there is no grand unification of forces and general relativity will be completely compatible with quantum field theory... simply because the two can never be applied on the same scale!

[ChicagoBob]

02:47 AM on 03/17/2012

I sided with Einstein from the beginning of this debate.

When it comes to physics, Al rules.

[jackstpaul]

04:22 AM on 03/17/2012

For now, according to most, but not all.

[Asmodeus]

05:18 AM on 03/17/2012

Unless of course you try to use his theories for what they were intended: A set of fundamental Unified Field equations. Then Al's work appears to be largely crap.

When faced with 'extremes' like Quantum mechanics, or the event horizon of a singularity, his equations become so much junk. Which means that while he may, like Newton have made some useful conceptual observations etc., but if, also like Newton, he wasn't really correct, then that makes him something the opposite of correct, doesn't it?

Which if any headway is going to be made on the problem, we're really going to have to start openly acknowledging, and trying to do something about it, beyond knee-jerk dogmatic faith in a known-to-be-flawed theory.

[palindrom]

08:07 PM on 03/17/2012

You know, I suppose, that absolutely everyone who works on these questions is acutely aware that GR cannot be the whole story.

Sure works well on larger scales, though.

[The Bob Files]

01:10 AM on 03/17/2012

In the late 1800's, two scientists in Cleveland won the first US Nobel Prize for their experiment that failed and failed and failed some more. In their failure to locate any difference in the speed of light no matter which way they looked, physicists had to come up with a new theory (Einstein was the one who ultimately came up with it). His General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics both seem to describe aspects of the universe extremely well... except that they are mutually exclusive. Hence, the experiments continue.

[SwiftJonathan]

04:33 AM on 03/19/2012

Quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity are not mutually exclusive. What seems to be wrong is simply the idea that there has to be a self-consistent quantum field theory of gravity. That, however, does not rule out that gravity is the thermodynamic limit of an effective quantum field theory. That basically puts the general theory of relativity with regard to quantum field theory in the same place as Newtonian mechanics is with regard to single particle quantum mechanics. And with that the grand unification of forces falls flat, because gravity is not at all like the other forces, and one can basically already see that in naive dimensional analysis... it's just that two or three generations of physicists have chosen to ignore this less than subtle hint of nature in favour of a slightly forced "unification" program that simply hasn't yielded any success... most likely because it can't because nature simply does not unify gravity on any scale... it merely "dissolves" it in quantum noise, so instead of gravity becoming equally strong to the other forces at small enough distances, it NEVER matters on any microscopic distance scale (and the 1/r potential is cut off at some effective distance).

[tlee47ftw]

11:03 PM on 03/16/2012

Let's see now....7 carry the one, square root of 15, divided by 49......Yep, got it.....
Funny haired German=24,496, People trying to prove him wrong=0

[ldfox56]

10:19 PM on 03/16/2012

The only way that particles could reach the end before the light is if they traveled thru time into the future. If the distance the particles traveled at the speed of light were far enough, it is possible that they would travel thru time and get there before the light. Then it would prove another of Einstein's theories. That traveling close to or at the speed of light would be a way of traveling into the future. Perhaps if they could use The Large Hadron Collider and let the particles travel at the speed of light around and around for an extended length of time before colliding at the end. Then they possibly could have another way to verify that time travel into the future is possible. And be closer to one day being finally able to send a human into the
future.

[tlee47ftw]

11:17 PM on 03/16/2012

If you travel very close to the speed of light away from the earth and then back when you get back the people on earth will appear to have aged much more than you have. Depending on how long you'r trip was the people your age when you left may be dead and gone while you are only slightly older. Have you traveled in time? I don't know. You and the people on earth have lived at a different rate. But what did time do? The GPS satellites in space are adjusted to run slightly slower. Not because of their speed. As a part of the speed of light it is far too slow to be consequential. But because of the earth's gravity having less of an effect on them. The clock on the satellite would run slightly faster. Gravity slows time as does speed. Less gravity, relative time is faster. It is all far too complicated for an old country boy like me. I sure wish I understood it.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
Einstein

[uniqumm]

08:47 PM on 03/18/2012

Love the quote!

For a country boy you're doin' not that bad!

[jackstpaul]

04:25 AM on 03/17/2012

"The only way that particles could reach the end before the light is if they traveled thru time into the future."

Or there could be factors--forces and dimensions--involved of which we are ignorant, presently, that are determinative.

[JohnHopwood2]

09:06 PM on 03/16/2012

Einstein is the cop on the block! He found this out without calculators and digital equipment etc. Scientists today couldn't hold his jockstrap!

[tlee47ftw]

09:00 PM on 03/16/2012

There may come a time when some or all of Einstein's theories are disproven, but it hasn't happened yet. He developed them in the early 20th century while a patent clerk and they still work today.

[Asmodeus]

05:27 AM on 03/17/2012

And that's the problem. We know the theory is flawed, but how? If all we find are observations that agree with his theories, then we are no closer to coming up with better.

When it comes to the need for, as well as the advantages conferred by a set of Unified Field equations, and the search for them, the attitude of "Well, good enough!" won't cut it. It's a sentiment that endangers any further development every time it's uttered.

[tlee47ftw]

12:32 PM on 03/17/2012

In everything one will eventually reach the point where it cannot be improved upon any more. That is not to say we have done so with the General and Special Theories of Relativity. However, they still work. The most likely point at which they may be changed will be when, and I do mean "when", a unified theory brings it and quantum theory together. Will that prove Einstein? Disprove him? Or only modify him? Who knows. The fact is, his theories have allowed physics to evolve for a century. They also have built power plants, weapons (not a good thing, and satellites, among other things.

[uniqumm]

08:52 PM on 03/18/2012

Disproven is very unlikely. Extended is possible, perhaps likely. Whatever theory will be developed (if it's humanly possible to do that) will most likely be more general and inclusive and have Einstein's theories as "special conditions".