Not a very popular one because even with Pepto-Bismol they just go right through ya.>> ^rottenseed:

I thought "Neutrinos" was a breakfast cereal

Why did the neutrino get to the other side? To cross the road.

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>> ^Jinx:

>> ^juliovega914:
If this measurement turns out to be true, we basically have to restart physics.

Again, not necessarily. It would be a ground breaking discovery and would certainly raise a lot of questions...but then I did perhaps one of the most brain melting experiments with results that appear to contradict theory and common sense when I was 14 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment


No, it would be a HUGE discovery! One of the biggest ever! and it would completely redefine our modern theory!

If a massive particle moves faster than the speed of light, that means the Lorentz factor for calculating the energy of the particle will be complex! (gamma = c/squrt(c^2-v^2), for v>c, gamma is complex). Do any of you have any fucking idea what that means?

(http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/veltran.html for those of you who dont know wtf I am talking about)

So... did the neutrinos get a ticket for breaking the speedlimit?

>> ^juliovega914:

If this measurement turns out to be true, we basically have to restart physics.

Again, not necessarily. It would be a ground breaking discovery and would certainly raise a lot of questions...but then I did perhaps one of the most brain melting experiments with results that appear to contradict theory and common sense when I was 14 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

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>> ^Enzoblue:

>> ^Ornthoron:
A little cold water for everyone:
If these results turn out to be solid, it will not necessarily conflict with Einstein's theory of relativity. Relativity can accomodate these particles if they have negative mass.

Negative mass doesn't even make sense to me. You either have mass or you don't. You can't really really really not have mass all you want, but it doesn't make you negative. Please explain.


Sorry, I miswrote. I meant to say imaginary mass, just like tachyons. It's the mass squared that is negative.

To a physicist, mass is just a number describing a certain property of particles, namely their inertia and gravitational attraction. To date, all observed particles either have real positive mass or are massless, but that does not mean that some other value (negative or even complex) is theoretically impossible. The Standard Model of particle physics is far from complete, and there are extensions to it that include Lorentz symmetry breaking and thus can accomodate faster than light neutrinos.

>> ^Ornthoron:

A little cold water for everyone:
If these results turn out to be solid, it will not necessarily conflict with Einstein's theory of relativity. Relativity can accomodate these particles if they have negative mass.


Negative mass doesn't even make sense to me. You either have mass or you don't. You can't really really really not have mass all you want, but it doesn't make you negative. Please explain.

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I have always been fascinated by neutrinos, they seem only begrudgingly part of this world, to which I can relate! I would be intrigued to find that our "dark matter" is the o so strange neutrino. Neutrinos aren't that massive, or interactive enough to be a likely culprit, but them turning up and actually doing something uniquely them is pretty interesting. If this is true, however, it isn't as much as a problem for normal people's understanding of continuous space as it is for mine of discrete space and time. In my understanding of space and time, I find it a logical necessary to have space and time have discrete, smallest units. This necessitates a "speed limit" for the universe, which the speed of light fit perfectly into. This would seek to either replace the speed of light as that limit, or change the understanding of how certain partials move through the map (I view space as a map of discretely connected points), for my system, then, I would have to have metarules of different elements and the way that the map applies to them, which isn't necessarily a problem, just odd. For people who think space is continuous, then this isn't as problematic, as objects are always jumping over infinite units of space to arrive at their destination.

>> ^WaterDweller:

I think I'm with xkcd on this one.


When the Cold Fusion results were first publicised I bet an engineer I worked with $50 that the results would be overturned. I won.

I thought "Neutrinos" was a breakfast cereal

It has been theorized for a LONG time that neutrinos could exceed the speed of light. Very cool to see it backed with some solid evidence. The finding itself, to me, isn't as fascinating as what can come FROM the discovery. It opens up routes to other huge questions, namely where does Einsteins theory of relativity break down? Where does it apply? Where does it not apply? It's another data point to hopefully bridge the gap between traditional physics and quantum mechanics. The more data points, the closer to a unified theory science can hopefully get. Its quite cool. I'm going off on the edge here. But what I'd ask is: Does it really exceed the speed of light? Imagine if it really doesn't exceed the speed of light, however from our frame of reference it does. How to explain that? Some sort of dimension tunneling (lets fly off on a crazy whim here, think hyperspace or tunneling through extra dimension(s)). As theory goes, everything is relative. So while a particle in of itself may not exceed the speed of light in it's frame of reference at that speed, it may actually go faster from our dimensional perspective. Who knows why. Space-time, the speed of light, and particles can do some very strange and interesting things.