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Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, who announced the discovery Thursday are still somewhat surprised themselves and planned to detail their findings on Friday.
If these results are confirmed. …. the finding will fundamentally change our understanding of how the world works, physicists said.
“This thing is so important many of the normal scientific rivalries fall by the wayside,” said Plunkett, a spokesman for the Fermilab team’s experiments. “Everybody is going to be looking at every piece of information.”
Plunkett said he is keeping an open mind on whether Einstein’s theories need an update, but he added: “It’s dangerous to lay odds against Einstein. Einstein has been tested repeatedly over and over again.”
“We’d be thrilled if it’s right because we love something that shakes the foundation of what we believe,” said famed Columbia University physicist Brian Greene. “That’s what we live for.”
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN.
Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that “they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail.”
That will be necessary, because Einstein’s special relativity theory underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. “It has worked perfectly up until now.” And part of that theory is that nothing is faster than the speed of light.
CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.
Given the enormous implications of the find, they spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.
If anything is going to throw a cosmic twist into Einstein’s theories, it’s not surprising that it’s the strange particles known as neutrinos. These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years.
Nevertheless, the Fermilab team, which shoots neutrinos from Chicago to Minnesota, will go back to work immediately to try to verify or knock down the new findings, Thomas said.
Drew Baden, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland, said it is far more likely that there are measurement errors or some kind of fluke. Tracking neutrinos is very difficult, he said.
So if the neutrinos are pulling this fast one on Einstein, how can it happen?
But that doesn’t mean Einstein’s theory is ready for the trash heap, he said.
If the European findings are correct, “this would change the idea of how the universe is put together,” Columbia’s Greene said. But he added: “I would bet just about everything I hold dear that this won’t hold up to scrutiny.”
Maybe light is just faster than we thought.
One result, while interesting, is insignificant. The result needs to be duplicated at CERN and at other facilities before Einstein can be seriously questioned.
i wonder if any of those physicists will come to the coffee room for some practical advice. i think it would be worth their while.
I am actually one of them, and I come all the time.
For halacha advice also.
roll over einstein? oh i thought this was gonna be about quotes from back to the future
That was never part of Einstein’s theory. My colleagues and I added that in, when it seemed too short.
This would actually greatly impact the theory of one type of “time travel” which is based on the theory of relativity. Which is: Since nothing can travel faster than light; If you are strapped into an object travelling 99.9% the speed of light for an extended period of time, during that time, the laws of nature will slow you down to a certain degree to keep you from moving faster than light, since nothing can be faster than light. And during that time that you are slowed down, everything else in the universe is happening and moving at the usual speed. So in essence, 5 minutes of your “slowed down” time can be 10 minutes in the rest of the world, since time for you is slower. Which means, at that rate, if you spend 20 years in that object traveling at that speed, and then leave the object, the rest of the world will have been in existence for 40 years. So you “traveled” 20 years into the future.
So, this new discovery would completely destroy that theory. Of course, that theory of “time travel” has never really been thought possible, anyway.
It isn’t a secret. We are doing this because we really disproved a different part of his theory, but that part is too secret to talk about.
I don’t have any complaints about Einstein, except that he wasn’t frum. Science is always changing. His theories were based on the realities of his days. If those realities have become different -doesn’t make him into an idiot.
True, it’s not really “time travel”. And they actually proved it? Wow, I did not know that. That’s cool. Thanks for that information! What I do know is that during one of the space programs in the 80’s (I think) when the astronauts came back to Earth, their onboard clocks, which were extremely precise, were a a significant amount of time behind the clocks on Earth. Which means they “time travelled”. But I wasn’t sure if that was related to this concept or not.
M80: If I recall correctly they put one on a Concord for 24 hours straight and flew it around the world and left the other still. It was like a difference of 40 nanoseconds.
Previous posters beat me to my point. Please delete.
MiddlePath: “…And during that time that you are slowed down, everything else in the universe is happening and moving at the usual speed. So in essence, 5 minutes of your “slowed down” time can be 10 minutes in the rest of the world, since time for you is slower.”
Sorry my friend, but you made an error. Just the opposite! When one travels the speed of light for 5 minutes HE RETURNS A FEW SECONDS EARLIER then everyone elses 5 MINUTES. His 5 minutes was everyone elses 4 minutes! That’s what the experiment, that Sam2 and Mod80 referred to, proved. In 1971 2 atomic clocks were put on a passanger plane that traveled around the world, and another one kept at the naval base. when they returned the clocks on the plane showed a SLOWER READ THAN THE ONE KEPT ON EARTH.
The significance of this theory tells us that if one were to travel at the SPEED OF LIGHT, i.e. the fastest known speed, one would actually return without LOSING ANY TIME ON EARTH! So when Middlepath mentioned that this new discovery had impact on “time travel” he is correct!! Because if things that travel at the speed of light, lose NO TIME on earth, what if you travel FASTER THAN LIGHT…..well, according to this theory, one WOULD GO BACK IN TIME!! Albert Einstein, when asked about that, said “NOTHING physical goes faster that the speed of light. So no going back in time……”
But with this new discovery…..
ROLL OVER EINSTEIN….-that was for you Goq!!
As I pointed out yesterday in the riddle thread, I think this is bogus. I mean, are we seriously meant to believe the reports from CERN, an organization known to be headed by a murdering Illuminati?
Come on. Questioning Einstein is just a ploy for attention and funding. Happens all the time in the academic world and in research.
squeak: Of course it’s a hoax! But it’s moyradig!! Got me thinking about travelling back in time….
Get out the flux capacitator boys!!!
The lomdisher shaylo goes like this: Was E=mc squared said ??????? or ???????
Squeak; I don’t know what the relevance of “A Murdering Iluminati” is to the subject at hand. But, you are mixing the singular and plural. Just like “Alumnus” is singular versus “Alumni” which is plural. “Iluminati”, whatever that means, is, by definition “Plural”. Case closed. No butts (of cigarettes) and ifs.
Many years ago my aunt took a flight and arrived 5 minutes before she left. (Of course, I must add that she was on a 55 minute flight and she was flying during the night when the clocks changed from daylight to standard time.)
metro- congratulations on spotting that grammatical inconsistency. I am well versed in Latin, so I hope you will believe that it wasn’t an error. I was making a joke through reference to a popular novel of late and I would expect the word “Illuminati” to have the greatest likelihood of being recognized, while the singular form would not be recognized. I doubt that either of those descriptions fit the real life director of CERN.
My last paragraph was serious. There is no better way in academia to attain funding than to grab the spotlight in any way possible. I don’t believe that the reported findings will overturn physics in any degree.
Baal Habooze, that is a big mistake. If the clock on board went slower, then it only moved 4 minutes while the rest of the world moved 5.
There is a lesson to learn from this. The more you move the longer you’ll live. If you sit around you lose time faster. How fast and how long would I have to run to become a full nano-second younger.
Talking about time manipulation, how did they make the leap from time advancing slower to time travel? That is besides the obvious question that if it will ever be invented then it would have been around for centuries.
If someone goes ahead in time and then comes back to four minutes ago, will he be stuck in an endless loop. If you ask him how many times he did it, what will he answer? If he will give you the number, that is a time-type reference, which would mean that he is not really travelling in time.
If time travel were possible, I would edit some more posts. I mean, unless it would only be allowed for the set time the first round
HaLeiVi: That’s what I meant. my bad.
Interesting that the only thing possible that really REALLY goes back in time is Teshuva. After 120 yrs people who did teshuva literally erased sins that were done in the past, so when you watch the movie of your life, those sins WON’T BE THERE….
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