Ftl- wtf?

[Janx]

So what's it mean if the experiment is correct and the effect is reproducible.

I can understand science folks jumping on the Einstein is never wrong so they must be bandwagon.

But would these guys post a claim like this if they thought it was wrong?

They're working on very expensive equipment. I assume whoever pays for it would be pissed if they grandstanded for nothing. Pissed as in, stake your career on it levels of outcome for being wrong with high publicity.

That doesn't discount them being wrong, but nobody wants to be the guy who claimed to have cracked Cold Fusion and then be shown how wrong he was. (Apparently Texas A&M has that distinction).

The actual experiment consists of shooting a bullet at a target and measuring the time it takes to hit and comparing that to the expected time. There's science and math involved, because the speed is so fast, that it ultimately means putting enough distance so the time elapsing will be big enough that our primitive clocks can measure it.

That seems both simple, and potentially hard to reproduce. These guys are using what ammounts to the worlds largest shooting range. There are not that many (if any) facilities that can handle it.

It is possible, there is a setup problem (clocks being the likely culprit). It's also possible that if these OPERA guys get off the range, the next set of guys will have the same result.

So, what can that mean? Say the result is valid. What cool things can we do with that?

 

[Morrus]

It also drives me crazy when someone says something like, "X times less." I've always thought that was incorrect to the point of being gibberish. Multiplication makes more, division makes less. (Yes, I know multiplication with a fraction makes less.)

I just assumed that scientists -- and other people who usually use precise language -- would never say such a phrase. But with Umbran saying this, it makes me wonder if my disdain for such phraseology is improper. Is "X times less" ("3000 times shorter") actually correct?

It's just a casual colloquialism; everyone knows what it means. You're gonna have a hard time of it if you object every time someone uses a colloquialism! They're a very prominent feature of language.

 

[Bullgrit]

You're gonna have a hard time of it if you object every time someone uses a colloquialism!

My brain literally explodes at the use of colloquialisms.

Bullgrit

 

[Umbran]

So what's it mean if the experiment is correct and the effect is reproducible.

It means that there's new physics we don't understand.

They're working on very expensive equipment. I assume whoever pays for it would be pissed if they grandstanded for nothing. Pissed as in, stake your career on it levels of outcome for being wrong with high publicity.

Okay, here's a very important point. Whatever the media might suggest to you, there is no "grandstanding" going on. They are not behaving like Pons and Fleischmann. They very sincerely went to their scientific colleagues and said the academic equivalent of, "Uh, guys, we saw something weird here, could you check if you see it too?"

They are following accepted academic process, published all their data for scrutiny, and all that.

So, what can that mean? Say the result is valid. What cool things can we do with that?

We couldn't say at this point. We haven't even fully determined if the thing happens at all, much less have a full description and explanation for it.

For example, the fact that you can have neutrinos move faster than light does not instantly imply that you can toss a star-ship around at FTL speeds, or even get electrons to break that barrier. The implications are honestly not known.

 

[Janx]

Okay, here's a very important point. Whatever the media might suggest to you, there is no "grandstanding" going on. They are not behaving like Pons and Fleischmann. They very sincerely went to their scientific colleagues and said the academic equivalent of, "Uh, guys, we saw something weird here, could you check if you see it too?"

They are following accepted academic process, published all their data for scrutiny, and all that.

That was kinda my point. There are strong disincentives for the OPERA dudes to be wrong or make StrongButWrong claims. I fully know they said "we saw something wierd, what do y'all think?"

I will go further to say, the OPERA dudes probably double-checked BEFORE they even said that much. Why go public and ask a question that could reveal you missed something stupid, when you can double-check and see if you can find it first.

As a result, I'm pretty sure the OPERA guys are pretty sure they see something wierd AND the cause is non-obvious. They already called in their eccentric physics nerd-roommate to double-check their rig BEFORE they went public.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I can understand science folks jumping on the Einstein is never wrong so they must be bandwagon.

He was proven wrong on a few things, like quantum entanglement, a.k.a "spooky action at a distance." Bohr was the victor in that particular discussion.

 

[Umbran]

He was proven wrong on a few things, like quantum entanglement, a.k.a "spooky action at a distance." Bohr was the victor in that particular discussion.

Well, we should perhaps distinguish between being wrong with opinions in discussion, and being wrong with theories he advanced in formal form.

My understanding is that Einstein never tried to prove "spooky action at a distance" couldn't or wouldn't happen. He never put it to formal math in a paper or the like. It was just his opinion, stated, as you put it, in discussion.

Einstein was never comfortable with quantum mechanics, though he got his Nobel Prize ostensibly for his addition to the field - describing the photoelectric effect.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Fair enough.

 

[freyar]

That was kinda my point. There are strong disincentives for the OPERA dudes to be wrong or make StrongButWrong claims. I fully know they said "we saw something wierd, what do y'all think?"

I will go further to say, the OPERA dudes probably double-checked BEFORE they even said that much. Why go public and ask a question that could reveal you missed something stupid, when you can double-check and see if you can find it first.

As a result, I'm pretty sure the OPERA guys are pretty sure they see something wierd AND the cause is non-obvious. They already called in their eccentric physics nerd-roommate to double-check their rig BEFORE they went public.

Absolutely. They wouldn't have brought it up 2 months ago if they hadn't checked everything they could think of to the extent possible with their experiment. They've since done a modified version of their experiment which is actually a bit better. One thing we are waiting for is for a couple of other experimental collaborations in other labs (one in the US, one in Japan) to run similar experiments. But the point is that OPERA was not designed to measure neutrino speeds, so there are a lot of fairly subtle things that could go wrong.

As for what this could be, that's quite complicated. I've been keeping one eye on papers about this, and there have been many odd ideas, most of which I'd classify as so much garbage (I refereed a short paper on this recently, and it didn't even try to do physics, just listed functions to fit data points). There are reasons it is so difficult. One is that there are very strict limits on low-energy neutrino speed from a supernova observed in 1987. Another is that, in most theories of superluminal neutrinos, there is a process that would rapidly reduce the energy of the superluminal neutrinos as they fly around. So you have to turn that off. I'm not sure I've seen any idea that does both of those things successfully. I suppose my favorite ideas are that there is some new field that exists near matter but not in space (attracted by gravity, sort of) that interacts with neutrinos but not much else or that neutrinos alone can move into an extra dimension, where the "speed of light" is just a little bigger. But who knows?