---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light. Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done. "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently." If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster. That's interesting, as are neutrinos themselves. If I recall correctly, they are forged as a byproduct of nuclear fusion inside stars, the first odd thing about them is that they start travelling faster than light speed so they side-step the problem with acceleration. They are also massless which means they avoid having infinite mass - having none to start with - this also helps avoid destroying the universe as there are rather a lot of them. A few billion neutrinos from the sun pass through every square inch of your skin every second. Perhaps the most interesting thing about them is that if they really are travelling faster than light they must be relativistically moving backwards in time. This is because time slows down for the observer as you get close to light speed and stops when you reach it (not that you can) but anything going faster is - compared to our time frame - going backwards. This has been used as a plot device in hard sci-fi for decades, astrophysicist Gregory Benford wrote his Timescape novel featuring communication from the future via neutrino beams, as did John Carpenter in his movie Prince of Darkness (it was far and away the best bit of the film).. So the question is, how come these guys at CERN didn't know this? Do they not read sci-fi or was Benford's book transmitted back through time as a publicity stunt? Perhaps it was pure theory until now and they are justifiably excited in being able to prove it? Interesting stuff, but Einstein is safe, for now....
