Was Einstein Wrong?

olasek said:
The problem may lie in the way time is measured in this experiment. There may be error, many physicists suspect that there is an error in the experiment, way too soon to declare Einstein was wrong. We shall see how it develops over the next months...
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Einstein is a already considered to be wrong on some things. We'll just have to see if this latest experiment stands up to scrutiny, replication of results, etc.
 
Palmpilot said:
Really?

Are there oil companies paying these people to propagandize against relativity?
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Palmpilot said:
There's a right way and a wrong way to challenge the laws of physics. Doing experiments and collecting data is the right way. Denying existing data is the wrong way.
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What about denying existing assumptions (aka wild ass guesses)?
 
Here's what the authors of that paper are going to hear, when they submit their paper to a journal:

POSSIBLE PHYSICIST DEVIATION ADVISE YOU CONTACT (facility) AT (telephone number).
 
Palmpilot said:
Einstein is a already considered to be wrong on some things. We'll just have to see if this latest experiment stands up to scrutiny, replication of results, etc.
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True, but if things can go faster than the speed of light, even neutrinos, they will have to rewrite quite a few Physics textbooks. That is pretty fundamental.
 
steingar said:
CERN Physicists find neutrinos that can travel faster than c, according to CNN.
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Not really, Einstein knew he was incomplete. He knew what he had worked, but it wasn't all there. He even had "Special Relativity" to fill in some holes. He realized all too well that there were things he didn't know.
 
denverpilot said:
There's the possibility that what they measured is that time is not a constant, too.

Which is why this week is taking so darn long. Happy Friday everyone!
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There is that as well, and what we may find is that the "Speed of Light" is actually the "Time Barrier". If you consider our Universe to be created by a collision of dimensions overlapping like a Ven Diagram, when we exceed the speed of light we cross out of the time bearing dimension and leave the known universe.
 
steingar said:
True, but if things can go faster than the speed of light, even neutrinos, they will have to rewrite quite a few Physics textbooks. That is pretty fundamental.
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Not rewrite so much as to append. What we have works, what we are about to discover will fill in the blanks of "beyond known physics". There have always been things we just accept because we had no way of answering why it was so, it just was. What CERN has always held the promise of is giving us a glimpse beyond what we know so we can answer the "Why" question.
 
olasek said:
The problem may lie in the way time is measured in this experiment. There may be error, many physicists suspect that there is an error in the experiment, way too soon to declare Einstein was wrong. We shall see how it develops over the next months...
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Exactly. I think somebody at CERN just wants some publicity. The inherent error in the experiment seems large relative to the amount "c" is exceeded.

However, Hawking and others have theorized that the speed of light can be exceeded as a boundary condition in black holes, IIRC.

Like you say, "we shall see". :)
 
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Just looking at the numbers, the difference between predicted and measured was only 25 ppm; I suspect that is really close to the measurement uncertainty. I suspect that some (dunno if all) of that difference can be accounted for by the experiment's measurement uncertainty.

Meanwhile, Bernoulli and Newton (and Franklin) still work for me and my lil' ol' PA-28. :wink2:
 
rotorhead1026 said:
Hawking and others have theorized that the speed of light can be exceeded as a boundary condition in black holes, IIRC.:)
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We know for example that Universe can expand with speed faster than light, this doesn't violate special relativity.
 
denverpilot said:
There's the possibility that what they measured is that time is not a constant, too.
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That's a fact, actually. :) Thus the speed of light is a constant, regardless of the frame of reference. Getting a grasp on this is critical to understanding relativity.

Or at least it was ... :D
 
Gary F said:
What about denying existing assumptions (aka wild ass guesses)?
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If it really is a wild ass guess, and you aren't just calling it that because you haven't bothered (or don't have time) to look into the evidence, no problem.
 
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If this finding pans out and we don't find the Higgs boson, physics may well be in for an upheaval. FermiLab had a similar finding a few years back but they had enough error in their measurements that they couldn't really demonstrate FTL neutrinos.

Cap'n Jack said:
Experiments to support the theory are the same way right now.

With this sort of physics, we're likely getting into the situation before the early 1900's. We have theories that explain a number of things, but there are some things that don't make sense within the theory (back then, it was some aspects of the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation for example...a few other experiments also gave results that didn't fit the theory). Failure to find the Higgs would force a reexamination of the standard theory; we still can't tie gravity with quantum mechanics although there are many models for this, no one really agrees with a particular one AFIAK.
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Cap'n Jack said:
If this finding pans out and we don't find the Higgs boson, physics may well be in for an upheaval. FermiLab had a similar finding a few years back but they had enough error in their measurements that they couldn't really demonstrate FTL neutrinos.
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Wasn't part of Fermilab's error that fact that they were into a precision level that rendered the neutrinos not particles but waves, hence they measured the backside of the wave at the start and the front side of the wave at the end...
 
JeffDG said:
Wasn't part of Fermilab's error that fact that they were into a precision level that rendered the neutrinos not particles but waves, hence they measured the backside of the wave at the start and the front side of the wave at the end...
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I'm assuming you mean the de Broglie wavelength? I think that's small enough to be neglible. Looking at the paper, it seems the sum of the timing errors in their measurements was similar to the difference in what they were trying to measure (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0706/0706.0437v3.pdf ).

Here's the link to the CERN paper:
http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
 
The time of flight measurement does not appear to be between that of two discrete events, but rather between two distributions of events. As best I can make out, there is an underlying assumption that there is a linear correlation along the time durations between the two distributions. I think that is also what the author of this article is getting at in his critique:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2011/sep/24/1?newsfeed=true
 
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