Neutrinos faster than light experiment

bibblebub | 10:31 Sat 19th Nov 2011 | Science

31 Answers

Leaving aside the possible ramifications of the results or whether those results are to be believed, what is it about the experiment that means this result has only been obtained this year?

Has it necessitated scientific / technological advances - such as increasing accuracy of time measurement - so that the same experiment couldn't have been done even 5 years ago?

Or is it something more mundane, such as no-one doing this type of experiment over such a large distance until now?

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Fibonacci

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from wiki
In the early 1980s, first measurements of neutrino speed were done using pulsed pion beams (produced by pulsed proton beams hitting a target). The pions decayed producing neutrinos, and the neutrino interactions observed within a time window in a detector at a distance were consistent with the speed of light. This measurement has been...

11:40 Sat 19th Nov 2011

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bibblebub

Question Author

the joke is about a physicist, not Heisenberg specifically

beso

I'm pretty sure Heisenberg both had a cat and didn't have a cat.

bibblebub

Question Author

I won't start a new thread about it but it looks like another part of physics is unravelling http://www.newscienti...rss&nsref=online-news - goodbye standard model, hello supersymmetry

beso

Hardly unravelling. More like further ravelling.
Supersymetry is an extention of the Standard Model.

bibblebub

Question Author

but not everyone accepts supersymmetry

beso

Indeed far from it. Last month they were saying that the LHC results were dealing a heavy blow to SUSY because there is still no sign of the Higgs.

old-wos-is-name

Sorry to come into this late, and to probably sound daft, but can someone explain in english why they have built the cern thing at a cost of £millions?. Its certainly not to just to prove Einstein wrong, what advances to mankind could come out of this? I know splitting the atom resulted in nuclear power, but racing microscopic atomic particles down a tunnel doesn't seem a futuristic moneysaver. if they do go faster than the speed of light, what difference will it make to our daily lives?

Old_Geezer

Because if there is a goal worthy of human intellect it is in discovering why everything is as it is, how it works. It need not be so mundane as having to make a difference to day to day life, but until you investigate you can not tell what will come out of it as a secondary benefit.

old-wos-is-name

Thank you old geezer,
I am all for progress, but the question is, does anyone on the answer bank know what they ( the scientists) are hoping to achieve? There is obviously a reason for spending buckets of money on which seems a silly experiment, so, could they know more than what they are telling us, as I really doubt that all this is just to curb someones curiosity. the question is , again, why did they build the cern project?? so if we can exceed the speed of light,what difference will it make to anything ,apart from upsetting some calculations that probably don't have any concerns for 99.9 % for people on this planet, ?

LazyGun

Its pretty simple really. Those scientists working at places such as CERN are trying to determine the fundamentals underpinning the universe though hypothesis, experiment and observation.

You cannot separate out just CERN in isolation and ask what advantages it might bring. Those efforts are part of the whole of mankinds scientific endevour, which has brought about pretty much everything that creates the world around us now.

Yes, fundamental research costs money, but you have to speculate to accumulate. Given all the potential future problems facing humanity - power generation, climate change, exponential growth of the population and the pressures that brings on medicine, agriculture, food production.