AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Here are actual physicists discussing the new discovery in slightly acceptable terms.

I understood less than half of that, but still pretty interesting.

this one was also endorsed by Brian May

I like this guy's answer. People just need to remember that science usually works by discovering something new and unexplainable, forming new hypotheses based on the observations, and going on to gather evidence to support or disprove those hypotheses. This is a perfect example, a previous scientific theory has evidently been broken, and now scientists are going to work to either confirm or deny the controversial findings. It doesn't matter whether the findings are confirmed or denied, either. It's not like if this neutrino really did break the light barrier, that suddenly we'll start getting light a little bit faster. It might mean that faster-than-light travel, every sci-fi nerd's wet dream, is now a true probability. Or the test results were wrong and further testing will reveal that. In any event, this will not affect anyone's everyday life.

Agreed.

@princess brothel and n/0,

That was beautiful. You are now my favourite posters.

I never believed that it was impossible to travel faster than light - that always seemed like an arbitrary decision on Einstein's part.

Hopefully this discovery will break down a lot of the psychological walls created by concepts like the theory of relativity and lead to new discoveries and ways of thinking about the universe and its 'laws'.

I do like it when the lynchpins of science are broken - the resultant 'house-of-cards' collapse of related material shows the folly of building all scientific understanding on a single theory - to the exclusion or ignorance of all other possibilities.


This is just my two cents; I'm not looking to get into a debate.

Interestingly enough, my high school Calc teacher showed us this video after like the third week of school.

Shame, you are getting one

The scientific understanding does not have to be totally rewritten. Just amended. The possibility of traveling faster than light just means that particles that are able to travel faster than light will be able to. They become exceptions to the law. We have never observed protons or electrons or even atoms move faster than light so the scientific principles remain more or less the same.

Someone more into the scientific theory should probably answer it, but the 'house-of-cards' idea isn't quite right.

"Never observed" being the key words.

I don't see why there is this mental block about breaking the speed of light.

First, we still have to see if the data is even correct and no errors were made.

Second, there was no mental block, there was just no reason to think otherwise. The theory was coherent in itself and supported by observation and experiments. There just never was anything observed that was faster than light. And I think it was that to even get close to the speed there would be needed more and more incredible amounts of energy the more mass the thing has. See how not even atoms reach lightspeed and those have nearly no mass.
So it is not surprising assume that the speed of light is the fastest, just as 0 Kelvin is the lowest temperature.

I guess the ability to measure and record these things is also the problem; I wonder if a lot of things moving faster than the speed of light are simply invisible to the majority of observational equipment we have currently to hand.


Rules are made to be broken it seems.

Atoms stop moving at 0 degrees Kelvin, but the nuclei of the atoms continue to spin even at these temperatures. It is possible for the temperature to go into negative Kelvin - observable by the spin of the atomic nuclei slowing down.


The honest-to-goodness trend seems to be that there are no limits, be it temperature, velocity, space, time, etc. etc. The trick is being able to observe that these 'limits' are actually nonexistant.

That news report was from 1955 and I've never heard of it. So I guess he was either wrong or it was just never applied.

DnD, while it's possible that this shows us a way to go past light-speed, it's considered just as likely there is something wrong with the experiment. This is almost definitely going to teach something new about physics, but not necessarily disprove relativity. Neutrinos are some of the least understood particles in science and this might teach us something about the way they interact apparently. Read the discussion I linked.

Also, Einstein did not arbitrarily set the speed of light as the absolute limit. He tried to explain the results of previous experiments that showed that the relative speed of light is always c, no matter the referential system. He came up with the theory of relativity, that posed the revolutionary concept that time isn't as constant and unchanging as we think, but is directly linked to the speed we're moving at (see my previous posts for a more elaborate explanation). His theory was then proven right time and time again by experiments. The speed of light is not some arbitrary limit, but a direct consequence of the theory of relativity. It should be as impossible as falling upwards.

Furthermore, I think it's highly unlikely this holds the key to FTL travel, unless we can turn ourselves into neutrinos somehow . It's a step in the right direction though. This could ultimately lead to FTL communication though. Then again, I'm no physicist.

Oh, forgot to mention, from what I've gathered, it'll take at least a year for other research facilities to set up and conduct experiments to verify and interpret these results. So it'll likely be awhile until we hear some more news.

Which means at least a year of retarded LOL FUCK YOU EINSTEIN jokes.