” Faster than the speed of light” NO. Glashow just proved it.

Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Laureate, just proved the CERN folks got it wrong.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.6562


He scooped one person at Johns Hopkins by mere hours - my son!
Not kidding here. Forgive my bragging, but all the theoretical high energy group at JHU know this.

Especially since it's written by a guy who wasn't even at CERN, has no access to their full dataset, and didn't even participate in the experiment.

Some scientists denied evolution, too.
And General Relativity when it was first proposed.

People like to cling to what they've built their worldview around.
Even if it turns out to be incorrect.

And by what authority can you make such statements, are you a phd physicist? Your statements would dismiss all theory and theoretical physicists!


Btw, Sheldon Glashow won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.

Nope. My husband is a phd physicist. And my son.

You?

He's basically saying, don't believe your lying eyes because the KNOWN laws of physics say what you witnessed is impossible.

That may be enough for you.
Not me.

It's the other way around.

The theory can reveal systematic errors in experimental data by showing inconsistencies with well-established physical principles and the result using data input of other experiments. This has been done numerous times in the scientific literature.

Yes, theory some times follow experiments, however theory can also lead to experiments. Why the hell do you think we even have CERN? Because theorists have postulated the existence of other particles that must be validated by experiments, like the Higgs boson and the search for extra dimensions predicted theoretically. It's the theorists who have driving these experiments!!!

Science is a 2 way street and they must be self-consistent.





Have a nice evening.

They had experimental data. Theory said it couldn't happen. Theory was right.

Maybe this guy is the preeminent expert on neutrinos. He wouldn't even need their data set to know it's not possible.

The tone of your post sounds hostile to those who say it can't happen, and like one of those "people who like to cling to what they've built their worldview around."

And until a lot more scientist say it's true, it's just a unexplainable glitch.

General Relativity isn't dogma, It's a rigorous scientific theory on par with biological evolution. Physicists "cling" to it because it has consistently made valid predictions and has also passed every direct and indirect test that it has ever been put to. GR is not going anywhere. It will still be taught 100 years from now, much as Newtonian physics, while technically "incorrect", is still taught today. Newton's laws describe the world that we live in precisely enough that they continue to dominate engineering, sports, aviation, etc. Einstein's theory only breaks down partially at the quantum level. It will likely remain irreplaceable to cosmologists and astrophysicists due to its extreme accuracy and also because it is intuitive to learn and use.

I've reviewed the data from OPERA and believe that their statistical analysis is flawed. Even if these results are verified through repeated experimentation, General Relativity is robust enough to accommodate solutions such as extra dimensions. Let's not get ahead of ourselves and carelessly toss away a theory that has performed flawlessly for over a century. It will take the steady accumulation of significant amounts of unexpected data to knock down GR. One odd result is not too compelling.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27212/?ref=rss

Click link within to read brief abstract of Cohen & Glashow's paper. (My son's paper will be published next week.)

"...we refute the superluminal interpretation of the OPERA result."

This actually doesn't violate General or Special Relativity.
And it doesn't mean you can send information faster than light: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x83938
So it doesn't ruin causality, either.

The physics community will take a few weeks to absorb this, then we shall see who they decide has it right.

We have to wait for other labs to repeat the experiment.
It's going to take more than a few weeks.

It has to be validated by other experiments.

And turn something else up.

Debunking the finding could be as simple as reading the paper and finding an inherent flaw in the methodology. You'd need to reproduce it in order to confirm it. Debunking is much easier.

The results will be reproducible, or they will not. Refinements to the method will almost certainly be needed to determine just what is actually happening, so the matter may not be settled this year.

Very sorry. You are right.

However, Sheldon Glashow will have given the experimentalists something more to consider. There is great skepticism in the physics community, more so than what I've seen posted by amateur scientists online who seem to be gleeful that the great Einstein would be over turned. I don't understand that.





Btw, there were have been lots of patent applicants who have claimed to have perpetual motion machines which are dismissed out of hand by the patent office because they are in violation of well known laws. :rofl:

In that case, Glashow and the entire rest of the world will have plenty to think about.

It's not really about overturning the "great Einstein," after all. An awful lot of modern physics is based on the speed of light as a nearly-absolute speed limit, and would be bollixed up by FTL particles.

bananas you are RIGHT!! Their data has to be repeated.


From my son:
"To be precise, it was not the CERN folks but the people at Gran Saso who got the superluminal neutrino results. They even think it's a nonsense result and are looking for systematic errors that could have thrown things off."

"Gran Saso is 730km away from CERN in Italy, where the OPERA detector was stationed. They were using neutrinos that came from CERN at ~17GeV (an amount of energy) but given the very reasonable assumptions Glashow made, there's no way OPERA could have seen anything above 12.5 GeV neutrinos. We're going to consider a modification that I'm guessing will push the result up by maybe a few GeV, but still nothing that should give the energy range they claim to see. Dispersion is really the only way to alter how things propagate. So now we just need to figure out what alterations to the dispersion relation make sense that would not screw with the results of various supernovae measurements and be consistent with OPERA's results."

"OPERA claims to see pretty energetic neutrinos, but their experiment is self-inconsistent because if they see faster than light neutrinos then they can't possibly see neutrinos with the energy they claim because they will radiate off other particles, resulting in energy loss, if they move faster than light. Glashow, I would say, killed the OPERA result with 90% certainly IMHO, so my next goal is to fill in the remaining 10% gap.

The dispersion relation related the energy and momentum of a particle and going faster than the speed of light is basically tantamount to changing that relation.
Dave Kaplan (my son's major professor: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/09/07/guest-post-david-e-kaplan-on-the-lhc-on-the-history-channel/) suggested the group do a follow-up calculation that considers a more general class of things that would lead to faster than light propagation to see if it might save the OPERA results.

"Prognosis: it won't, although it's still worth checking and writing the follow-up paper on it however. The follow-up paper will be ambulance chasing, but it's worth making use of the results I got so far."

It's an argument that the OPERA should not be seeing any neutrinos at the reported energies. OPERA group's interpretation is shown to be at odds with some well-founded theories.

This doesn't particularly surprise me, since the whole interest in the results is the fact that they shouldn't be seeing what they claim to see in their data. What's more interesting is either laying out the error they've made (whether it's in the handling of data, or some systematic error in the experiment) or explaining just what it is they may have seen instead of superluminal neutrino propagation.