Large Hadron Collider breaks physics, screws up theories.

[Mcupobob]

First the HIV and AIDS thing now were breaking the light barrier. Damn sciences is kicking ass this month.

 

[bpm195]

This is really interesting and such, but I still don't have my jetpack yet. I'm not letting you out of the lab until I get it.

Edit: Though I'd settle for a hover car.

 

[Robert Ewing]

What, I literally said on another thread that it would take hundreds of years to break the light barrier... Fuck sake...

IT WILL TAKE THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO INVENT STAR TREK STYLIE REPLICATORS.

 

[GeorgW]

I have never believed that the speed of light can't be exceeded. I also don't believe in Higgs' boson. I don't really think they've exceeded it this time, but I believe someone will one day.

What, I literally said on another thread that it would take hundreds of years to break the light barrier... Fuck sake...

IT WILL TAKE THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO INVENT STAR TREK STYLIE REPLICATORS.

No it won't.
The only truly ridiculous and far off sci-fi notion is minimizing and enlarging things.

 

[Findlebob]

Bout time it did something.

 

[Housebroken Lunatic]

Lol. Very true. Although I seem to recall another person here noting that neutrinos pass through matter as if it wasn't there a lot of the time, meaning they travel at the speed of light in a vacuum even when passing through solid ground.

If that's the case, then there is something interesting going on. Faster than light in a vacuum after all, violates the known laws of physics.

But if their calculations depended on a lower speed than that...

Then again, isn't the assumption that neutrinos pass through matter EXACTLY as if matter was vacuum a theoretical assumption?

I mean, how much matter have they actually tested to accelerate the neutrinos through? Has anyone actually tried to accelerate neutrinos through one lightyear of lead and see if they actually travelled at the same velocity that they would've through one lightyear of vacuum? Or if that sounds overambitious, have they actually tried accelerating some neutrinos through a distance of solid matter (lead for instance) as long as the one in this experiment, and some neutrinos through a distance of vacuum and recorded the time it took?

Im fully aware of the fact that improbably displaying some of my lack of knowledge of physics (and this is because it was a long time ago that I studied physics), but as you might deduce from my ways of thinking and reasoning, im what you could call an "idiot savant" of scientific methods and experimentation.

Meaning I might not be the one adept at memorizing the results of every experiment performed or being able to apply all the theoretical formulae for purposes of calculations and measurements of an experiment, but im pretty good at rooting out the cause of freak results in experiments and pedantic about insuring that any experiment takes place in a controlled enviroment, paying respects to all possible factors that might influence the results etc. etc.

Which im doing right now, despite the fact that I may lack some essential knowledge about particle- and quantum physics.

Interestingly enough: I've learned that this ability is often absent during many performed experiments. I guess that when you over-specialize in abstract theories and calculations a bit too much like the prominent scientists in these fields of study do, it might become easy to forget some of the basic stuff. :/

 

[drisky]

Haha, epic mispelling of the op headline! Do note that it says "HARDON (Hard-on) Collider"!

Oh the humanity! XD

Good catch, now all I can picture is large hard ons colliding. Take that physics!

 

[CrystalShadow]

Lol. Very true. Although I seem to recall another person here noting that neutrinos pass through matter as if it wasn't there a lot of the time, meaning they travel at the speed of light in a vacuum even when passing through solid ground.

If that's the case, then there is something interesting going on. Faster than light in a vacuum after all, violates the known laws of physics.

But if their calculations depended on a lower speed than that...

Then again, isn't the assumption that neutrinos pass through matter EXACTLY as if matter was vacuum a theoretical assumption?

I mean, how much matter have they actually tested to accelerate the neutrinos through? Has anyone actually tried to accelerate neutrinos through one lightyear of lead and see if they actually travelled at the same velocity that they would've through one lightyear of vacuum? Or if that sounds overambitious, have they actually tried accelerating some neutrinos through a distance of solid matter (lead for instance) as long as the one in this experiment, and some neutrinos through a distance of vacuum and recorded the time it took?

Im fully aware of the fact that improbably displaying some of my lack of knowledge of physics (and this is because it was a long time ago that I studied physics), but as you might deduce from my ways of thinking and reasoning, im what you could call an "idiot savant" of scientific methods and experimentation.

Meaning I might not be the one adept at memorizing the results of every experiment performed or being able to apply all the theoretical formulae for purposes of calculations and measurements of an experiment, but im pretty good at rooting out the cause of freak results in experiments and pedantic about insuring that any experiment takes place in a controlled enviroment, paying respects to all possible factors that might influence the results etc. etc.

Which im doing right now, despite the fact that I may lack some essential knowledge about particle- and quantum physics.

Interestingly enough: I've learned that this ability is often absent during many performed experiments. I guess that when you over-specialize in abstract theories and calculations a bit too much like the prominent scientists in these fields of study do, it might become easy to forget some of the basic stuff. :/

Good question. A light-year of material is a lot to test experimentally. Especially when the whole problem with neutrinos is that they don't really interact with anything.

(And as a side-effect, they can't really be controlled very easily.)

Consider that the LHC uses superconducting magnets to keep it's particles within the collider ring...

Now try and see if you can deduce a way of controlling a particle that doesn't respond to most of the forces we're used to manipulating...

I suspect most of the information about neutrinos is theoretical precisely because of how difficult it is to devise a practical experiment that does anything meaningful with one in a controlled manner.

Even detecting something that doesn't interact much with other matter is already quite a feat, and I'm rather impressed anyone has devised methods to do so.

I agree it'd help answer these things more clearly if there was extensive experimental data, but it seems like that's asking a lot.

 

[Housebroken Lunatic]

Good catch, now all I can picture is large hard ons colliding. Take that physics!

Just following in the footsteps of one of my dead idols (Bill Hicks). His acts was described by himself as "Chomsky with dick jokes". And my act is pretty much "dickjokes and science" ^_^

 

[zehydra]

"Large Hardon Collider"

Oh... lol. That's a funny typo.

Edit: Unsurprisingly, I've been ninja'd.

 

[Housebroken Lunatic]

I agree it'd help answer these things more clearly if there was extensive experimental data, but it seems like that's asking a lot.

But that shouldn't prevent us from doing just that. Science will stagnate in quality and integrity if people stop questioning it's findings, after all.

 

[zehydra]

I have never believed that the speed of light can't be exceeded. I also don't believe in Higgs' boson. I don't really think they've exceeded it this time, but I believe someone will one day.

What, I literally said on another thread that it would take hundreds of years to break the light barrier... Fuck sake...

IT WILL TAKE THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO INVENT STAR TREK STYLIE REPLICATORS.

No it won't.
The only truly ridiculous and far off sci-fi notion is minimizing and enlarging things.

enlarging things.

for the hardon colliders.

 

[McMullen]

Yes, that's what the LHC is, but this experiment wasn't done using the LHC, which is 27 km long, and fires either protons or lead nuclei to see what happens in a high-energy collision.

However, you'll note this experiment says:
"Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early."

Which actually explicitly answers my own question... But, eh well... Whatever. XD

Well then you were actually onto something.

I mean this discovery might just be something so trivial as to say that the speed of light through solid ground wasn't what we thought to be and not nearly as important as finding out that neutrinos could go faster than the estimated speed of light through vacuum.

In fact, when reading the text properly I feel disappointed. I mean, sending a bunch of particles "through the ground" is a terrible premise for a scientific experiment. I mean, just try to account for all the substances from the periodic table that the neutrinos could've passed through! They could've passed through several different metals, gasses and fluids which would most likely influence the results slightly depending on which types of metals, gasses and fluids we're talking about.

I.e A LOT of "noise" to the results, which ultimately tells us nothing.

Stupid physicists. IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO EXPERIMENTS, THEN MAKE SURE YOU DO THEM IN A CONTROLLED ENVIROMENT YOU NOOBS!

Where the speed of light in a vacuum is concerned, the universe is a controlled environment. It's supposed to be universally constant. It doesn't matter what you shoot it through, a neutrino shouldn't be able to travel faster than c.

I could mock your last sentence by swapping certain words and keeping others, but I don't think I have to.

 

[tthor]

Ok, so...what exactly does this mean in scientific terms?

that something strange happened, and scientists are confused as hell, and are trying to figure out if they did their math wrong somewhere

My first inclination upon hearing this though was to ask if it was referring to the speed of light in a vacuum, or whether it was the speed of light in some other medium.

Well personally I think they wouldn't have made such a fuss about it if the neutrinos were submerged in any other medium than a vacuum.

I mean, what would be the point to trying to confirm theories regarding the speed of light by shooting neutrinos through water or air?

actually this test had nothing to do with the speed of light, which is why the scientists were all the more shocked when they found the neutrinos had possibly traveled faster than the speed of light.

 

[spartandude]

Please tell me this could mean ftl travel with in my life time (i doubt it and i think it was just a maths/calculation error) but if it does mean space flight then I will try everything i can to over come my depression just to see that

 

[Endocrom]

Altering the upper speed limit in the universe, eh?

Futurama was right!

Professor Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert Farnsworth: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Professor Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
Cubert J. Farnsworth: Also impossible.

 

[kauyon]

Well, I think I picked the right career path; I'm about to start a PhD in nuclear physics.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

Particle physicists are easily the most pedantic people in the world about repeating experiments. The theory behind most particle physics produces only probabilities, not certainties, so it's necessary for the sake of accuracy and assurance that the theory is reasonable that every possible outcome be produced hundreds of times. In this case, it is not likely that the supporting theory is a mere probability though; this is one of several things:

A systematic error; an error in procedure, potentially some kind of flaw in a piece of code, or hardware, that might occur reliably given the right conditions. This is the type of error that will lead to a false conclusion, since by nature it does not influence results randomly, and thus doesn't get accounted for by regular error analysis, and requires specific elimination. The scientists involved would not have neglected this possibility. This is why everything is published, then scrutinized and repeated though; if there's a flaw, the scientific method won't allow it to go undiscovered.

A new phenomenon specific to this situation. This is the part where the scientists behind string theory would probably create a few new dimensions to explain everything. This sort of thing has never happened anywhere else as far as we've seen, so it's possible the conditions that created it are unusual in a way that we currently do not recognise. This will require extending the most applicable theory to compensate.

A new general theory. Unlikely to be entirely new; there's always someone with a mathematical analysis that fits slightly better. Relativity, both general and special, is very hard to get rid of, because it explains a lot of things that many other competing theorys can't.