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

[binary solo]

WereKitten said:

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.

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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.

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.

Well it can be explained by known (or theorised) phenomena. If a neutrino leaps between 2 points via wormhole rather than travelling between 2 points then if that leap is far enough, or a big enough number of little leaps happen, simply grossly measuring time between very distant points A and B makes it look like the particles are travelling faster than light when they are not. But to show FLT you have to know what the neutrinos are doing for that whole 732km journey to make sure they aren't cheating by taking a few leaps.