So...E(doesn't)=mc^2?

Delta

Delta

Selling colourful Pokemon to Celadon Game Corner
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Any views on our entire understanding of relativity being at risk? If the results come out that Cern was correct, it means that all of Modern Science will have to be tweaked a little. I am just laughing that, all our physics classes were a waste of time. It's a nuetrino too so it's dang small.

Here is a link top a small article on their public website.
A slightly more indepth article.

Whenever buzzkill physicists tell me my time machine isn't going to work, they always say the same things. "You can't accelerate past the speed of light!" "It's a cosmic constant and nothing can travel faster!" "Your dream of leading a regiment of dinosaur cavalry to defeat Hitler is heavily flawed!" Well guess what, physics geeks: you were wrong! The Brachiosaurus Brigade shall ride again!

According to researchers at CERN, a stream of neutrinos sent between Geneva, Switzerland and Gran Sasso, Italy can make the trip a whole 60 nanoseconds faster than light. Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles that we've known about since 1934, but this is the first experiment showing that they may be capable of exceeding the speed of light. Although the scientists at CERN are waiting for their results to be independently verified before rewriting your science textbooks, they are confident in their findings. "We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," explained the group's spokesman Antonio Ereditato.

Assuming that these results hold after independent testing, this may be one of the most revolutionary discoveries in recent history. The inability to exceed the speed of light is crucial to the Standard Model of physics, so finding out that the universal speed limit may not be absolute will have wide-reaching ramifications. Just how it will be immediately useful is still up for debate, but it could change the foundations of how we think the universe works. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to make a trip to the Jurassic and recruit my troops.
Source

I'll update with any more news I can find.
 
Yeah I think this is pretty cool - and every science textbook I've ever had has said it could happen. But it's not like this will really change science that much. Theoretically it will, be we'll never really interact with this thing so practically it won't.

I'm sure a thousand years from now people will think we were all stupid for believing the science we have now, just like we think the people who thought the earth was flat, the center of the universe and that life was just formed spontaneously were stupid.
 
You never know for sure. I mean, we are talking about nanoseconds here, which isn't an easy thing to measure without large margins of error. Let's also take into the consideration that they've yet to replicate this. Sure, it would be great if we could break the mold of Einstein's great theory, but always hold the bit of skepticism and wait until it looks like it's the real deal.
 
Zyflair said:
You never know for sure. I mean, we are talking about nanoseconds here, which isn't an easy thing to measure without large margins of error. Let's also take into the consideration that they've yet to replicate this. Sure, it would be great if we could break the mold of Einstein's great theory, but always hold the bit of skepticism and wait until it looks like it's the real deal.
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Nanoseconds are easy to measure. It's when it starts to hit teraseconds where it then becomes tricky.
 
Plus they said the margin of error was only 10 nanoseconds.

But I still agree that there could've been a technical problem.
 
safariblade said:
Plus they said the margin of error was only 10 nanoseconds.
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They essentially claim that it reached the destination point 50~70 nanoseconds earlier than the speed of light. As much as it is difficult to outrun that speed (if possible), I find the measurement to be held with a grain of salt regardless. There's no alternative theory to Einstein's, which is quite a problem to this finding. If the result is replicated, then there will either be a great revelation among the theory of physics, or we're back up quite a few steps: so much has been built off the theory of relativity, and knocking foundations is never a good sight to see.
 
Nizolka33 said:
What I want to know is: if there is no error, what does it mean for us today and for our future?
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It means that (practical) space travel across galaxies might be possible.
 
^No. The only thing that's changing is the idea that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. The theory of relativity will have to be rethought, but that's only a tiny, tiny portion of physics. Nothing close to physics being rewritten.
 
That tiny, tiny portion is abstract mechanics. There are calculations of insane, not-easy-to-measure numbers in many theories that are based off the theory of relativity. As said here:
Einstein's theory is critical to the Standard Model of physics that helps explain everything we know about how the universe works, from black holes to the big bang.
If it is shown to be flawed, virtually everything in modern physics and the fundamental laws of nature would have to be rethought.
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Neutrinos are tricky little buggers. It's hard enough to try and measure where they are, let alone accurately getting the accurate speed with that (Heisenberg uncertainty principle anyone?). Not to mention that neutrinos have really weird properties from what I've heard. It's well within experimental error. And physics has been wrong before. Quantum mechanics were born because Newton's Laws could not be applied to atoms and subatomic particles.
 
This is why I hate sience sometimes, we learn to accept one thing, then eventually someone comes and turns our understanding of everything we know upside down. :( :headbang
 
While it would be nice (read as "awesome") to understand everything about how the world woks, you have to understand that we are trying to turn everything we can experience into simply a set of facts and formulas. This, as its main goal, is probably close to impossible.
 
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