Did CERN just break physics?

Docaroo said:
This will come back as debunked I'm afraid... as exciting as it could be, neutrinos have mass and it is not possible for a particle with mass to travel at the speed of light, nevermind faster than it. If this was true then it would be possible to send a message back in time (I won't go into how). Information (mass) cannot travel at FTL speeds, special relativity will hold true here....

Sorry to kill the excitement!
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Einstein was wrong about many things, and many of his theories were disproved by other scientists even when he was alive and kicking in the classrooms.

It is really annoying that Steven Hawking came down with that illness, he would be the perfect person to start looking into this, and heck, given the freedom to freely speak with others he could have torn Einstein's E=MC2 apart a long time ago.
 
Docaroo said:
Einstein may have been wrong about some things... but one thing he has never been wrong about is Special Relativity. SR has been proved by every test of it's theories and predictions that have been made, it simply works. E does equal MC2 I'm afrain, there's no "tearing it apart" !!!



Because to accellerate something with mass to the speed of light requires infinite energy... so the power of the whole universe (no matter how small the mass is!).

Further, if you could have mass travelling faster than light speed then under Special Relativity causality is broken. You would be able to send a signal back in time in that case....
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Hmmm.... C can change although it is constant. For instance, light through water travels slower than light through air, and light through air travels slower than light through a vacuum. People take the C being constant too literally. There is no real reason why C cannot be faster than vacuum constant and we have already proved many times that light can travel far slower than the vacuum constant.

Also, sending a signal faster than light wouldn't mean sending a signal back in time. What it means is that by current theory the effect would happen before the cause. Another thing take too literally. They are saying the signal would be there before you see it, mimicking time travel. But it isn't time travel at all.

But the E=MC2 hasn't stood up to everything questioned about it, a lot of the questions we simply haven't been able to test but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be asked.

For instance, send a football beyond the speed of light to a destination. When the ball arrives at it's destination and it has stopped you should be able to see the ball stationary at it's new destination, but the light reflecting from the ball is still travelling to get there from where it came. Will we see two balls superimposed over each other when the light finally catches up? We simply do not know but that is something E=MC2 says can only be impossible and at the same time other proven theories say is the only possible outcome.

All we can truly say is that E=MC2 has been 'accurate enough' to help us discover more things and like all things science it is entirely possible that it is entire wrong. Einstein and science in general have been wrong about many things before, there is no reason why this particular situation could prove Special Relativity to be wrong as well.
 
Docaroo said:
This is because it takes around 3 hours for photons from the Supernova to "escape" the star with all the interactions that happen on the way out.

Neutrinos don't interact with matter and so escape instantly...



I think you are a bit confused... C (the speed of light in a vacuum) is constant!! It's THE universal constant! Yes, light can travel slower than C is different mediums, but that isn't the speed of light lowering - it's the absorption and re-emission of photon speed that lowers... light speed is still light speed. The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant and does not waver - the example you cite is incorrect.

Now the second point, I said that if you can send information Faster than Light then you break Causality. This means, that if you could send a signal (or matter, anything with "information") faster than light, via Lorentz transformations and other mathematics the signal you send could arrive back to you BEFORE you send the signal out!

Imagine the signal says "Don't send this signal". You never send it, and it never returns telling you to not send it... so you send it. This is causality. Breaking causality will ruin physics as we know it, and it should be unbreakable. How can the effect occurr before the cause?

This is why FTL information travel is impossible. Either FTL is impossible, Causality is wrong or Special Relativity has everything wrong.

Choose!

Oh... and read this:

http://johncostella.webs.com/neutrino-blunder.pdf

Looks like the statistics and maths need another examination
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Yes it is constant. I said it was constant. But that is only accounting for light in a vacuum. It doesn't account for light in other substances or other non-substances that we haven't discovered yet to test it in.
 
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