WHY?

JFC.

WHAT!?

he meant 'heart'

Are you doing stealth advertising!? Well along with telling you that your comment SOUNDS LIKE IT COMES FROM AN INFANT I'd like to say GTFO!!!

You will forgive me for taking things at face value with all these retarded comments floating about I'm sure.

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. Only the space they leaped across via quantum tunneling was only a short distance of the total distance travelled, which gave the appearance of faster than light travel, but in fact it was a short distance of jumping from one point to another and at no time were the neutrinos actually travelling through ordinary space faster than light. If you are travelling through a wormhole then you appear to be travelling faster than light, because you're going from A to B instantaneously. But you are not actually traversing the intervening space, you are bypassing it. So you are not really travelling faster than light.

So I'm inclined to say that it's possibly not measurement error, but also that the neutrinos aren't really travelling faster than the speed of light in the classical sense. And indeed what is happening is already a known phenomenon. Certainly my nuclear physicist, rocket scientist brother was not terribly surprised by this news, and in fact it accords with one of his own theories about how elementary particles might behave.

Let's not forget that for some years, decades even, the modern atomic model was shunned because there was no way for an electron to spin around the core without ending up falling into it - and then someone came up with quantum physics. I just hope if that's indeed true scientists don't hold to Einsten's model like a Bible and discard it straight away.

Who knows, maybe some particles go around at superluminal quantized speeds. But I'm talking out of my ass here.

Which part do you refer to?

Why it's about time? Because it's exciting and could finally bring us forward. I'm not a top scientist so maybe I'm missing something but it seems that in the last few decades, nothing big has really happened.

Why I fear this is an error? Because it would be boring and we would be where we started.

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.

Well if the speed of light is indeed a universal speed limit then your ''about time'' statement makes no sense. Meaning that you've actually believed all this time that Einstein was wrong.

People just like sensational stories, which is why this one is getting so much attention. My money is on you having this motivation - sensationalism. The fact is the universe has its laws and they are independent of what you believe, therefore 'hoping' for something is meaningless.

Sorry for shitting on you, this extends to all people who are going ape-shit about this story but don't understand relativity.

I might be losing popularity points along the way, but someone has to bring some sanity to these discussions.