Today’s physics news: Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at CERN, and more…
Today’s physics news: Speed-of light experiments give baffling result at CERN, and more…
Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at CERN
Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists because subatomic particles seem to have beaten the speed of light.
BBC
Nature
Second big satellite set to resist re-entry burn up
A defunct German space telescope called ROSAT is set to hit the planet at the end of October – and it even is more likely than UARS to cause injury or damage in populated areas.
New Scientist
Tags: CERN, Daily news, neutrinos, physics, satellite, speed-of-light
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4 Comments
Russ Lindemann was right in his book “Bending The Ruler” The book discussed this very thing and many other related issues which with his help I suspect are about to be disproved.
It is necessary to wait for details from physicists from CERN, Fermilab etc. But, on the basis of B.Sc. Physics knowledge (which may be considered as the level of a common reader), one can expect neutrinos to move with velocity greater than that of light. This is because neutrinos are mass-less and can not face the barrier of relativistic mass increase – set by Albert Einstein..
Neutinos are not massless. They were once considered so but experimental data has shown otherwise. Photons are massless particles but don’t exceed the speed of light in a vacuum.
In the years before WW2, Michelson measured the speed of light. During WW2, radar results showed that this value was wrong, leading to Essen and Frome remeasuring the value using microwaves. These methods required sophisticated corrections for diffraction effects.
If (and its a big if) the neutrino results are verified, then one possibility is that the optical/laser methods of measuring c are subject to unknown (diffraction/ wave related or light/matter interactions) systematic errors. Neutrinos, having virtually no interaction with matter, will be free of these effects. Thus this result may need a re-evaluation of c, and/or a redefinition of the metre.