Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Do the neutrinos break the speed of light?

Neutrinos have such small mass,
we couldn't even measure it but
constrain what it could be at most. 
Last week according to the result published by the OPERA experiment held between CERN (Geneve-Switzerland) and Gran Sasso (Italy) seems like neutrinos- created by electroweak interactions- appears like travel faster than the speed of light. The last report from that experiment suggest that neutrinos with an average energy 17GeV exceed the speed of light about 

$(v-c)/c=2.48\pm0.28(stat.)\pm0.30(sys.) \times 10^{-5}$

here $c=299\,\,\,792\,\,\,458m/s$ is the speed of light in vacuum. Neutrinos are created at CERN, and they travel to Gran Sasso about $730534.61m$ and according to the detailed analysis by OPERA experiment neutrinos exceed the speed of light by an amount of $~7435m$. That seems quite small compared to the speed of light but if it is true the implications on modern physics and the understanding of the laws of the universe are unthinkable. Therefore I would like to point out that since I see a lot of articles about Einstein implying that he was wrong or his theory just broke apart. In fact, in the article about special relativity, he never claimed that nothing could travel higher than the speed of light, contrary he claimed that nothing could accelerate and exceed the speed of light.

To be more clear I would like to write down the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos. 

speed of light         $299\,\,\,792\,\,\,458 \,m/s$
speed of neutrinos  $299\,\,\,799\,\,\,893 \,m/s$

Just notice the last four digits. If you would like to learn much about the experiment or the analysis you could read the report in arXiv.

Update: Recently the OPERA collaboration after more analysis on the data and new data, they analyzed systematic error sources and backed up their first result that neutrinos indeed travel exceeding the speed of light. Sure a lot of discussions and possible explanations for the phenomena emerge, here one of the blog pages where a lot of discussions still going on.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The Crackpot Index

Well, once in a while I indeed face an uneducated fella who claims that Einstein's energy-mass relation is wrong not knowing there is momentum as well in the equation or some other who just discovered a machine that could run forever or a way to produce energy but giving less. Anyway, I have found a way to index all these ideas thank John Baez for supplying this list. Here is some of them

A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:

  1. A -5 point starting credit.
  2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
  3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
  4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
  5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
  6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
  7. 5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
  8. 5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
  9. 10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
  10. 10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school as if this were evidence of sanity.