h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/roll-over-einstein-pillar-physics-challenged-194937846.html

"CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light."

How the heck can you?

a) Fire a beam of light and a beam of neutrinos simultaneously?
b) Be able to verify that you did do a)
c) Detect the light beam and the Neutrinos with a method that has a consistent reponse time for both.
d) Be certain that the neutrinos that you detected are the ones that you sent.

I have always understood that these things are so small and weakly interacting that they practically pass right through the whole planet with barely a sniffle. How can we possibly have enough control over these things to perform an experiment of the likes of this?

someone forgot to put a realy hot cup of tea in the finite probbability generator

You're a Jerk Dent... a Complete Kneebitter:

its dark underground, we know the speed of dark is faster than the speed of light, how ever fast the light goes the dark is always there before it

Nah.... I'm thinking roller skates.

You get a guy with a stopwatch, and a big button. He presses the button to release the neutrinos and the light and starts the stopwatch at the same time, then when the light flashes inside the neutrino detector, he stops the stopwatch.

Easy!

As for d), neutrinos are detected very rarely, so if you press the button and at the predicted time you suddenly see some neutrinos, you can be sure they're your ones.

How can we know how these experiments are done? We can't know, and nor should we wish to know. We must simply have Faith. To question is to deny Faith. All Praise the Men In White Coats.

Aren't the CERN folks the ones that will cause the destruction of ?

That's the "large hardon collider"?

http://xkcd.com/955/

the nutrinos went under ground the light didn't, did they take into account the curveture of the earth, the underground bit being closer, it would look faster

Sensibly...

they didn't fire light at the same time... Its calculated against the theoretical maximum speed of light in a vaccuum.

Its not the first time this has been observed, though the other time was within the limits of error.

No one knows how this can happen. It breaks a LOT of the rules of physics/causality... We're all doomed...

Brian Cox on this result.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034852

TVM Clive, reposted to G+....

Brian Cox said-'(speed of light)is the universal speed limit'

Obviously they used a Gatso camera and so have a photographic evidence

Brian Cox is, to use one of his words, a total nobber. He suffers from this bizarre affliction where seems unable to accept even the possibility of anything he hasn't himself observed which, in a physicist, is a bit of handicap really.

Brian Cox is the Magnus Pike of our generation, a comic, slightly bufoon who makes science interesting and accessable to the masses

you'll get fundy christian grannies going, ohh i like that Brian Cox he is such a nice boy, while listening to how god didn't make the universe

some of it will settle subliminaly

Mister Dreadful - Mr. Dreadful



What other phenomena has he poo pooed apart from this one that has made you come to this conclusion?

It's hot, I've not been thinking straight.

He's still a total nobber, though. Can't stand the man.