Faster than the speed of light?

[Sundae]

Cox also happens to have a gorgeous accent and is slim and passionate and has dark hair.
Not that that's my type Dani. Ahem.

Anyway, Neil Finn predicted this years ago:
In time you'll see that some things
Travel faster than light
In time you'll recognise
That love is larger than life

[Lamplighter]

Hey, I may have been closer to the answer than I thought !

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

He's much too polite to say it, but everyone knows that when Mussolini made the trains run on time, he did it by making the clocks run slower.

Today, the news is reporting there may be a solution to the original problem...
MIT Technology Review (blog)
kfc 10/14/2011
Faster-than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity

The relativistic motion of clocks on board GPS satellites
exactly accounts for the superluminal effect, says physicist.

This article has an explanation for laymen of the proposed solution:

It's easy to think that the motion of the satellites is irrelevant.
After all, the radio waves carrying the time signal must travel
at the speed of light, regardless of the satellites' speed.
But there is an additional subtlety.

Although the speed of light is does not depend on the the frame of reference, the time of flight does.
In this case, there are two frames of reference: the experiment on the ground and the clocks in orbit.
If these are moving relative to each other, then this needs to be factored in.

So what is the satellites' motion with respect to the OPERA experiment?
These probes orbit from West to East in a plane inclined at 55 degrees to the equator.
Significantly, that's roughly in line with the neutrino flight path.
Their relative motion is then easy to calculate.

So from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite,
the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing.

"From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source
and consequently the distance traveled by the particles
as observed from the clock is shorter," says van Elburg.
By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground.

The OPERA team overlooks this because it thinks of the clocks as on the ground not in orbit.
How big is this effect? Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early.
But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment.
So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observes.

If it stands up, this episode will be laden with irony.
Far from breaking Einstein's theory of relatively,
the faster-than-light measurement will turn out to be
another confirmation of it.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685: Times Of Flight Between A Source And
A Detector Observed From A GPS Satellite.

[Undertoad]

XKCD cashes in!



The XKCD guy is super-smart.

[Happy Monkey]

Loose cable?

[Lamplighter]

That needs some explanation from the technical geeks to the laymen.

To me, loose connection means intermittent signals, not faster !

[Happy Monkey]

It was a cable to an error-correction device of some sort, so an input to the formula used to calculate the speed was off, if I understand correctly.

[regular.joe]

If the observation was correct, it does not mean that Einstein was wrong, there have been many repeatable observations made that prove that Einstein was right. It just means that we have observed something that we do not understand. This is not a new thing, us making an observation of something and we do not understand the underlying mechanics of what we are observing. I think it is much more common than we would like to admit. The whole of science is really about us revising what we thought we knew, or adding to what we don't all ready know only to revise what we thought we knew.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by regular.joe

If the observation was correct, it does not mean that Einstein was wrong, there have been many repeatable observations made that prove that Einstein was right. It just means that we have observed something that we do not understand. This is not a new thing, us making an observation of something and we do not understand the underlying mechanics of what we are observing. I think it is much more common than we would like to admit. The whole of science is really about us revising what we thought we knew, or adding to what we don't all ready know only to revise what we thought we knew.

Well stated.

[tw]

Apparently there is still nothing faster than a speed of light, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

[Sundae]

Yay! It's TW's funny day again.
I like this day.