Eat Your Heart Out Einstein: Particles Faster than the Speed of Light Dicovered

[WereKitten]

binary solo said:
I suppose some of you might not know this but "time travel" was proven to be possible about 10 years ago via a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling.

A german solid state physicist shot a beam of electrons at a sold block of material (through which the electrons could not pass physically). The information he was transmitting was Mozart's 12th(?) Symphony. What happened was the electrons basically went through little wormholes in order to get past the obstacle. What was the result? The electrons arrived at the receiver on the other side of the block BEFORE they left the transmitter.

So these neutrinos could have been doing the same thing.

(snip)

1) quantum tunnelling means that the particles "tunnel" through a potential (think energy) barrier, for example appearing on the other side of a block of material that they could not traverse in classical dynamics because they have not enough energy. It is routinely used in many microelectronic devices and has nothing to do with wormholes or tunneling through spacetime per se. Actually the simplest formulation of quantum tunneling is done with stationary solutions to the Schroedinger eq., meaning that we know there's a certain probabilty of finding the particle on the other side of the barrier it shouldn't be able to pass, but we don't study how it moved to reach that zone.

2) In wave mechanics you can define many speeds. There's group speed, phase speed and front speed. Special relativity does allow phase and group speed to be over c, because - to abstain from technicalities - there's not a real transmission of energy or information at speed >c... what you see "moving faster than light" is in each case an abstraction made by the observer, that can't carry arbitrary information.

The synthesis: what is exactly transmitted in tunneling and how is a very subtle subject. If you research for it a little you'll find that most physicists think that the Heitmann-Nimtz results, as well as other about evanescent fields do not actually imply a violation of relativistic causality. In all cases, the Heitmann-Nimtz result is far from being any evidence of wormholes: that would be an incredible result of which the whole world would have heard much more since '94 :)

The case here discussed (the allegedly superluminal propagation of muonic neutrinos) is potentially extremely exciting, because it would mean that there would be new fundamental physics at testable conditions. But you'll notice how coy the authors are being, basically saying something on the lines "We know it's more likely that we did something wrong than really finding superluminal particle propagation, but we could not find where we miscalculated. Can the community help us find it?". Right now most physicists would probably bet on some miscalculation on the exact timing of the "preparation" of the neutrino burst rather than on a genuine violation of special relativity.

Thus, it's really exciting news, but far from being accepted as a relativity violation or easily explained by known phenomena such as quantum tunneling.