Einstein's theory threatened:CERN scientists discover particle traveling faster than speed of light

Guys read this article........

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/are_we_fooling_ourselves_with.php?utm_source=networkbanner&utm_medium=link

It made me laugh. It seems more like a stampede of neutrinos. Got to find a neutrino cowboy.

While I have not followed this story there seems to be a few points that need to be made. Neutrinos only couple to weak-force interactions and gravity so neutrinos don’t go whirling around in a particle accelerator like protons/neutrons/positrons (depending on the apparatus). The neutrinos don’t “feel” the magnetic field used to control the paths of charged particles. So if anything, the only part a collider would play would be creating neutrinos when the source and target particles collide.

The neutrinos would come out in all directions but each would propagate linearly, Earth’s gravity at the surface not deflecting them significantly. So a neutrino, following a curved path in an accelerator or at the surface of the Earth is not going to happen. The neutrinos don’t need a pathway like the open air or a tunnel anyway. Since neutrinos only extremely rarely interact with matter the solid rock holding up the mountains in that area of Europe would be a convenient path for the neutrinos. It has been calculated that the mean free path of the neutrino, even in a medium as dense as lead is more than 50 light years. Put another way, if you build a lead wall 300 trillion miles thick as a barrier to neutrinos on average *every* neutrino to reach your barrier would come through on the other side unscathed.

So for one thing, your issue with incorrect path measure is not a consideration here.

No I understand your concern but I believe it will be an unforeseen anomaly. Perhaps spikes in the core magnetic field or some local anomaly that affects instrumentation. Also if it is true then they could stall until they have an alternative theory i.e. they could say it is an instrumentation failure when it isn't or just go quiet and when asked say that it is complex and is still under investigation ... how will we know? I can't see them coming out (any time soon) if it is true and saying so because of the ramifications and consequences of basically starting again... it won't happen... I'd say. If others reproduce the effect then ... later... much later there will be a paper published.

Keep making those points, Zarathustra.

That was really able2learn stuff. Thanks.

You misread me. I believe they are using surface curved length in their calculation and not the straight path. The curved surface 'mapped' distance is 730 km. The straight path is shorter like the string in in bow. I am suggesting they measure the the proper length of the path or distance using lasers. However seeing the video, the path seems to be thru various pipes and connections which could be difficult to use a laser beam for measurement.



If the path is thru solid rock then obviously there can be no measurement by a laser beam.

Do you really think that physicists are so dumb that they don't understand the difference between a chord and an arc?

Who knows? Have they shown how they got the distance of 730 km. Anyway like I mentioned earlier if the true straight distance is 730 km the medium is rock not a vacuum and if it was a vacuum it is a problem.

I guess I am missing the point, so I will just point out a couple more things. You seem to be confused with the guide-ways in the picture, most of them aren’t even involved in this experiment they are just showing the area infrastructure as a context. The neutrinos are created in the target chamber which is about in the middle of your picture. Protons are coming from the SPS through that blue tube which is curved but at a stage before they strike the target. From there you can see everything is in a straight line. The hadron stop and other detectors near the bottom of your picture are, I am sure, to filter all but the neutrino flavor they are using. I think they are using muon neutrinos. The remainder of the path would certainly be through the earth. No one could ever get funding to build a multi-billion dollar tunnel that isn’t needed!!!

I am also pretty sure that for distances of that nature measurement is taken with GPS these days.

As a last point, something of which I am quite sure scientists are aware :-), you can send particles at greater than “c” without violating special relativity. This was first done with Photons in 1993 by Raymond Chao (sp?). His interpretation is a little difficult to describe in brief but the quantum packet is a little blurry due to the uncertainty principle. It shift or “leans” forward with movement. So the detectors can go off at differing times depending on what shape the quantum packet happened to take. It would be roughly analogous to two sleds racing and one sled rider putting his hand out to trigger the finish line beam ahead of the other sled when they really got there at the same time.

I do see the bottom of the blue wye where the neutrinos exit to Gran Sasso which doesn't show any tunnel or tube. I guess it is just solid rock as 730 km would be too much to tunnel thru (the Alps) and expensive. It would cost a few billion dollars. I don't buy the use of statistics as 100% scientific tool for cause and effect. It is rather a tool for profit and gambling. Neutrinos are hard to handle and control as they have no charge and a very small mass. The earth is bombarded by the sun constantly with all kinds of rays and the magnetic field, the Van Allen Belt?, does not shield us from neutrinos thus the 1400 meter depth for the experiment. Statistics help in location and probability but could never identify the cause. There is no cause and effect.
Many failures occur from mundane things. Once these mundane errors are taken care of then only can true analysis begin. The behavior of neutrinos itself is problematic so anyone trying to solve this problem has his/her hands full.

It would be exciting if it proves that neutrinos do go faster than light. We would enter new territory. Relativity seems to have been a problem with quantum physics from what I know.

Quantum mechanics

No wonder it is a mess.

This neutrino project is a mess from the get go.

No wonder the EU is a financial crisis. I wonder how much was put into this neutrino project.

Further to the complications. It is 1,400 meters deep. 730 km is roughly 520 miles The radius of the earth is roughly 4,000 miles. The shafts leading to the two sites should be normal to the earth surface i.e using a plumb line. The two shafts meet at the center of the earth. The angle between the shafts is the arctan of 520/4000 = 0.000392 and so on. I won't go further as it is a waste of time.

Lulz at your mastery of trigonometry.....

The margin was small. I believe neutrinos were clocked at 12,000 mph faster than the speed of light. The mundane problem is they have to match up a time pulse and the beam fans out as it goes from Geneva Lab to Grand Sasso Lab. The beam spreads out to about half a mile across at GS. CERN measure the whole thing but at GS they measure the core only. This can lead to a systematic uncertainty in the measurement due to the shape of the beam (time pulse shape at arrival) at the target detector.

I have to admit I don’t know what your last two posts are supposed to mean so I will just say to your statement: “Relativity seems to have been a problem with quantum physics from what I know.”
General Relativity is not compatible with QM. This experiment is, however, related to Special Relativity not General Relativity. Quantum Electrodynamics is Quantum Field Theory with the modifications of Special Relativity. So it’s been many decades since QM and Special Relativity have been incompatible.

I also don’t the know point of the depth of the facilities etc. but if the issue is still the path, the neutrino path is a straight line. As I pointed out before the neutrinos see to that. This picture from CERN is about is simple as it gets.

What your calculations have to do with this is not easy for me to see.

<snork>

I told him that the physicists weren't dumb.

Can't copy cone image I made on Word. Imagine an ice cream cone with a curve on top.


arc, Km = 730.00
arc, Miles = 453.61
arc/(R, earth radius) = Ø radians = 0.11
Ѳ degrees = 6.50
Ѳ/2 degrees = 3.25
sin Ø/2 = 0.06
x1 = Rsin(Ø/2) miles = 226.69
x1a =(R-0.87)sin(Ø/2) miles = 226.64

depth, Meter = 1,400.00
depth, Feet = 4,593.17
depth, Miles = 0.87

(2) x1 miles = 453.37
(2) x1a miles = 453.27

Difference, miles = 0.24
= 0.34 @ depth of 1400 m
Difference, feet = 1,283.19
= 1,803.84 @ depth of 1400 m


Assuming CERN is 730 Km from Gasso in a straight line

arc, Km = 730.39
arc, Miles = 453.86
arcsin(x1/(R, earth radius)) = Ø/2 radians = 0.06

Ѳ degrees = 6.50
Ѳ/2 degrees = 3.25
sin Ø/2 = 0.06


x1 = Rsin(Ø/2) miles = 226.81
x1a =(R-0.87)sin(Ø/2) miles = 226.76


depth, Meter = 1,400.00
depth, Feet = 4,593.17
depth, Miles = 0.87


(2) x1 miles = 453.61
(2) x1a miles = 453.51


Difference, miles = 0.24
= 0.34
Difference, feet = 1,285.26
= 1,806.18 @ 1400 m depth

The difference is minor between the two assumptions. The neutrino complex is quite large and has to be outside the cone.


The point is to create doubt so more information could be elicited from CERN.

Your posts are increasingly hard for me to follow. I don’t understand what you are calculating or why depth seems of such importance to you. If the source apparatus was at 1000 feet deep and the target was at 100 feet deep it would STILL be a straight line. If one was at 1000 feet deep and one at 3000 feet above sea level inside a mountain it would make no difference. There is no curved path of the type you have been talking about, so curved or straight I have no idea where this extra path you are using is coming from.

The only thing that I can think of, which I would give you more credit than thinking, is that for some reason they are using the length from the surface above one or both installations as the path measure instead of from the source to the detector; which would produce about the distance difference in your calculations. This is, of course, an absurd suggestion and even less likely than a particle traveling faster than light. Scientists regularly working in spatial areas on the order of the barn (10−28 m2) are not likely to make such a blunder – to say the least :-)

And to this statement:
“The point is to create doubt so more information could be elicited from CERN.”

You really can’t believe the scientists at CERN care or even know of any critiques from the masses. Let alone would have the time or the inclination to actually follow any of this up? If it wasn’t for public-relations people this stuff would never even get out to the public, and actually the lion’s share of experiments in all fields don’t ever see the common light of day. But thanks to the PR people CERN has whole web sites dedicated to every experiment that they run, how much more information is needed?

Since real-life data is very noisy and nothing like (idealized) data demonstrated in text books, I have a feeling that when the data is reanalyzed the faster than light particle will have disappeared from the data. This I am sure is a more likely scenario than teams of PhD’s suddenly becoming brain dead.

This sentence makes me laugh. I think you can't leave science to scientists alone any more than war to generals. Look at the genetic modification and the chimpanzees experiment in Africa by Dr. Hilary Poprowski (spelling).



Isosceles triangle


The top angle is 6.5 degrees or .11 radian
The sides are 4000 miles, roughly the earth's radius.
x2 is the base length or stright distance grom CERN to Gasso at ground level.
x2a is the length of the straight path between CERN and Gasso at 1400 meters depth.

I have included an image of a triangle for your benefit.


First assumption was the curved path was 730 km
Second Assumption was the straight path was 730 km.

My calculations of y, depth of crust at the mid-section of x2a.

y = Rcos(Ø/2), miles = 3,993.56
y = Rcos(Ø/2), km = 6,434.61
x2 = R-y, miles = 6.44
x2 = R-y, km= 10.36
x2a =x2+1.4 km @1400m dept = 11.76

y = Rcos(Ø/2), miles = 3,993.57
y = Rcos(Ø/2), km = 6,426.85
x2 = R-y, miles = 6.43
x2 = R-y, km = 10.35
x2a = x2+1.4 km@ 1400 m depth = 11.75

The crucial distance:

Difference (730m-x1a), miles = 0.34
Difference (730m-x1a), feet = 1,803.84
Difference (730m-x1a), km = 0.55
Difference (730m-x1a), m = 549.80



Difference (730m-x1a), miles = 0.10
Difference (730m-x1a), feet = 520.93
Difference (730m-x1a), km = 0.16
Difference (730m-x1a), m = 158.77

The straight path underground at 1400 meter is shorter than 730 km for both assumptions. It is shorter by 549.80 meter assuming a curved 730 km curved path at the surface between CERN and Gasso.

In the second assumption it is shorter by 158.77 meters. The only markers in this project are the plumb lines of the shafts.

I wonder if you understand that digging plumb line elevator shafts point to the center of the earth thus forming a triangle from the center of the earth to the two labs CERN and Gasso.