Faster than light???

Wow!!!

Its finally happened in my lifetime, a new physics discovery, or has it?

You may have seen on the news recently that scientists based at the LHC at the CERN facility in Switzerland have successfully fired a stream of neutrinos(very, very small particles of matter) through about 700km of rock and mountains towards Italy where they were detected by an experiment called OPERA.

Ok, so what i hear you cry!

Well, they were reported to arrive around 60ns (thats 0.000000060 seconds) early. i.e. faster than light particles called photons would arrive over that distance.

You see most things we think are 'solid' like rock, and humans and other objects we use everyday are actually about 99.9% empty space. Yes thats what i said, empty space.

Well what the hell does that mean?? It means that the atoms we are made of are mostly nothing, empty. The gap between the atomic nucleus and the orbiting electrons is that large in relative terms that particles such as neutrinos usually just pass staright through as if nothing was even there. If the atom was the size of the earth a neutrino would be smaller than a grain of sand.

We are all bombarded by millions of these tiny little pieces of matter everyday but of course we do not notice them in the slightest.

So that is why neutrinos can fly through rocks pretty much unimpeded for 700km. But what does travelling faster than the speed of light(if they did that is) actually mean in reall life terms?

Well, firstly it has not been proven that they have travelled that quickly.(approx 299,792,458 m/s for light in a vacuum), but if they did indeed finish first then that has some very profound impacts on real life. Firstly it means that our entire notion of causality is affected.

If you throw a ball to someone, and they catch it. Then it is fairly intuitive to us that they can only catch it after it has been thrown. Now in 'faster than light' causality, in theory you could catch it before it left the other persons hand...........mmmmmm....

So this means in deeper terms that things like the conservation of information is affected, entropy is affected, time direction is affected. In a faster than light universe, it would be possible to in theory travel backwards in time. In practical terms it is virtually impossible, as you would still need to create an immense amount of energy to outrun the fabric of teh cosmos and possibly skip through a shortcut to get to the other side before a signal you had sent yourself via radio got there!!

So, was the experiment faulty in some way?

Well there are those that think there was some error in the GPS clocks used to calculate the speed. Errors maybe in the distance between the two marker points. Errors in the timing of when the particles left CERN and arrived in Italy?

So far though all of the error margins calculated only accounts for around 10ns of tolerance. So where did the additional 50ns come from?

Nobody knows yet is the answer, but when they do we will either be in a new dawn of physics, or where we were before which much better error calculations for such high energy experiments!

Either way we will have learnt something new.

But i hope we are in a new dawn of physics and science as a whole. The speed of light has been a cornerstone of modern physics since 1905 when Einstein published his now famous theory of special relativity.

If proved corrct, and the neutrinos did actually travel faster than light, how did they manage it?

Well, there are many theories to this to. Hidden dimensions that are so small only particels such as neutrinos could pass through them, or possibly the membrane theory that states that our reality is played out on a one dimenisonal plane called a membrane, and to jump between membranes requires very small high energy particles like neutrinos to take short cuts outside of the fabric of space-time to get from A to B.

Think of it like driving along in your car on a straight road, there is another road that takes you through a tunnel to get to the other end much faster, but the tunnel is very small and no cars will fit though. Only a motorbike could fit through. Bot travelling at the same speed, but actually travelling differnt distances is one explanation as to why neutrinos may have reached Italy ealier than expected.

Its very interesting stuff, because for the first time, if validated it may have provided actaul experimental proof of string theory's hidden dimensions.

We will only know through rigorous experiment and calculation as to whether or not it was correct. But for now, i personally would like to think that it was............