Sectorgame

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Very interesting. And it's going to shatter a lot of science if it turns out to be confirmed.

I thought it was indeed very interesting, particularly for this quote
Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: "If this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something nobody was expecting. The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect.

"Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered."

Albeit it's worth noting we're dealing with tiny margins here - billionths of a second.

6 times the stated margin of error for the detectors, but still; what are the odds of it being an unknown sensor issue rather than a fundamental change in physics?

(NB: that isn't a rhetorical question)

It's got to be an error somewhere... the fact that they haven't found it yet means it's either a really intricate and possibly interesting one, or just a plain dumb one nobody even considered. Faster-than-light, even just for neutrinos, would be too awesome to be true.

Conventional physics? It was nice knowing you.

As an aside, has anyone read Forever Free by Joe Haldemann?...

Alright, who broke physics...

Sorry, I tripped over the Ethernet cord, and the scene stalled while I was putting it back in.

It just seemed like it was going faster.

Any updates on this?

I guess we can only wait until the Japanese and/or the Americans publish their results...

FSF wrote:I guess we can only wait until the Japanese and/or the Americans publish their results...

Well, even the CERN team haven't actually formed any conclusions yet, only published their data. I skimmed the paper they released; everything physics-y is completely over my head, but the conclusion is essentially to 'OMG WTF?'

Bearing in mind that it's a bit of an ultimate nightmare, too. Given the amount of checking and testing required to determine the standard error, they have two interpretations. Either they fundamentally broke physics, or they have a complete utter b#stard of a mistake to find and fix.

They're checking it alright, in Europe as well as America and Japan... Results should appear in a couple more months. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15471118

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

The team which found that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and confirmed the result.

Einstein is going to come back as a Zombie!

I'm awaiting peer-review on this, before fully accepting it.