Could Neutrinos be Tachyons?

"There was a professor named Bright

Who travelled much faster than light

He left one day

In a relative way

And came back the previous night."

- Anon

v_ν < c < v_t? Thus ν ≠ t? (Wild guess; please excuse limited typography.)

Let's see if the data is confirmed, first. There is supposed to be a second report today.

At this point we may be speculating about something that does not exist, but it would be far more interesting if it does.

I am not sure how you make the jump from neutrinos to tachyons. Tachyons are a theoretical particle and there really is no evidence to date to support them. Neutrinos are, at least, observable.

I was using tachyon just in the sense that (some of) the observed neutrinos may be faster-than-light particles - it is, after all, where the name comes from. I realize that neutrinos aren't hypothetical!

If real, this would be great news in the sense that a whole new aspect of Physics would open up. Like suddenly discovering a vast new island in a spot you thought was simply open sea.

The skeptic in me, though, says that they probably erred over some subtle aspect of general relativity (frame dragging perhaps) when calculating the arrival time for a light beam and they got a number that was too quick by those same 60 nanoseconds. The article does not say if they ever sent out a pulse of electromagnetic energy at the same time as the burst of neutrinos, to allow a side-by-side comparison of arrival times.

I seem to recall reading that neutrino bursts had been detected from supernova. If I were an astronomer working in that particular field I'd want to go back and re-examine that data to see if the neutrinos arrived substantially ahead of the light bursts that occurred when those stars went supernova. If so, this could act as a new interstellar 'yardstick' for gauging interstellar distances.

Well, anyway, I am eager to see what responses they get from the larger Physics community, and what some of the crackpots come up with too. This could be fun.

Good thought on reviewing astronomical data.

As far as the crackpots go, it will be assigned to 2012.

Yes, that was the Kamiokande detector experiment observation of a Large Magellanic cloud supernova SN1987A. At that time the three hour lead time of neutrino detection and visible light observation was chalked up to the lack of interactivity of neutrinos with anything between us and the supernova. Thus the neutrinos travelled at the speed of light in an ideal vacuum where as the visible light travelled at the velocity of light in the actual level of vacuum in space. This new data result of neutrino velocity, if found to be true, will put a dramatic new spin on all physics. One of these new insights will be a new estimate of the distance between us and the Large Magellanic cloud.

They're saying that the supernova neutrinos would have arrived five years earlier, instead of three hours, if the velocity was the same as in this experiment.

What do you think is more likely.. neutrinos travelling at variable speeds that exceed light, or warped extra dimensions that are irregularly warped ?

Well there are only a few possibilities.

Some body did the math wrong.

The neutrino velocity, timing data is wrong and this is just another honest mistake by a group of scientists.

The actual distance to the Large Magellanic cloud is closer than we think, by several orders of magnitude.

There are other unknown factors in inter-stellar and inter-galactic space that effect the velocity of light and neutrinos.

That the neutrinos detected hours prior to the 1987 super-nova visible light reaching us actually had nothing to do with that super-nova.

Take your pick.

"Some body did the math wrong."

or the universe does math differently than us.

However it turns out, doing the experiment (detecting the neutrinos at the receiving end) is a pretty fantastic achievement. They're very hard to detect due to low interaction with matter. About 10¹⁴ neutrinos/m² hit the Earth each second, produced by nuclear reactions in the Sun. Only about 1 of these is absorbed by Earth, the rest go straight through. I believe early detectors used big tanks of bleach (reaction with chlorine atoms) but sounds like there have been major improvements since then. The flux of neutrinos in the experiment must be much lower than the Sun's.

Codey

The test was done from Cern to Italy, in a straight line, not a circular path. So the clocks were separated in space time. Since experiments have shown that atomic clocks disagree after being separated, this simple fact may be the reason that forty nanoseconds separated the two clocks, which were probably synchronized before being separated in space time. If the clocks were to be brought back together, would we get the twin paradox?

I would expect that these clocks were synchronized remotely at their respective locations so that they maintained a common spacetime (no relative acceleration and deceleration). Remote synchronization down to femtosecond accuracy is not a trivial exercise but it is a well known practice.

You are right.

The same goes for the distance measurement. I seriously doubt either is the source of the discrepancy.

I had a few neutrinos fly through me today as a matter of fact. This news doesn't surprise me, it excites me. I think the findings will be duplicated over and over. WOW, just think of all the text books that will have to be thrown out claiming light is the speed king. As for the relationships of time...the possibilities will be blown wide open. Very exciting.

It is exciting, but I'm less excited about the 'time travel' implications (if they exist). According to what I read, this would open up the possibility of travelling backwards in time. Somehow I can't think of an application for going backwards, if there's no possibility of travelling forward as well..

Perhaps because Eienstein himself said he expected all his therories to be proven wrong because he was not satisfied with them? Due to the fact he had to fudge his psuedo tensor that acts like a tensor but is not in fact a tensor at all, yet all mass must be described by a tensor. This is why he worked his entire life trying to figure out the errors in his theory, errors which are overlooked by modern science.

Perhaps the distance was measured on the surface of the earth which is not a straight line. Neutrinos go through the earth in a straight line which is a shorter distance. If so, they traveled at the speed of light, but didn't travel as far as was expected, hence the error.

Maybe Flandern and his claim that gravity travels faster than c isn't quite as impossible as everyone thought. Hmmmm, maybe we should actually find out what gravity is and what causes it before we dismiss such things. But nah, can't be right, nothing travels faster than c, or does it??? Find out in the next installment of As the World Turns!

Wait I know, it was that pesky CDM, oops that's WDM now that did it? Or maybe gravitational waves that did it? Or WIMPS? Maybe the Higgs Bosun of supersymetry?

Muon-type neutrinos leave and tau-type neutrinos arrive. Something is changing. Could this be an energy gain/loss? A sort of sub-nuclear "phase change"? It will be very interesting to see what comes out of this. Not to mention the Texas School Board.

I heard about this on the radio this morning, and a thought occured, if this is true, then surely time travel will be possible, at least in one way?

The way I see it is that it might be possible for information to "time travel", but I do not see this as a mechanism for people or objects to transverse time.

Even at that, the amount of time travel would be small on the scale of how far back it could be done - at least using neutrinos as that vessel.

Given that verification of the results is a necessary condition for this discussion to proceed upon, pending that verification, I propose the following:

(1) we still do not know what dark energy / dark matter are (or in some cases what "is" is.

(2) suppose the neutrinos do not interact with dark matter/energy, but that light is refracted (slowed, etc, etc. ad nauseum).

(3) would it not follow that both travel at C, but one travels at C(0), and the other travels at C(med)? This also assumes that each travels in a straight path from A to B.

Hi, James,

I do not think it is necessary to wait until verification to proceed. Everyone is allied to speculate.

I am not aware of Earth being in the middle or near any dark matter. It seems to me that I remember something that we are not. If that is true, then dark matter is probably not a contender since the experiment was run here on Earth.

I don't know about dark energy and there have been theories that support it as well as theories that discount it. I could not say if it is a factor.

Probably the bet lab to rule for or against this hypothesis is our universe. There are many studies that should be able to support or discount that theory. It might be a good starting place to review that data. I am sure it is one of the tools being used now to try to explain the results from CERN.

I have no clue what we observed, but if it upends the existing Standard Model I am all for it. Not that I have anything against the SM, but I think when the proverbial roof comes crashing down in these instances that we learn the most and it clearly is the most exciting (to me).

I cannot really follow the mathematics well enough to completely understand what SM, or SM-extended imply relative to neutrino behavior. It would, hoever appear to me that if neutrino mass is nonzero, then there must be an interaction between the neutrino and other matter, or the field of one of the forces, that changes propagation through the experiment.

Does this have any relationship to Cherenkov radiation? As I recall, this comes about by some particles traveling faster than C in water?

I suppose I should leave this alone, and go back to my water chemistry.

See the article:

Physicists reported Thursday that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos can travel faster than light, a finding that -- if verified -- would blast a hole in Einstein's theory of relativity.

In experiments conducted between the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland and a laboratory in Italy, the tiny particles were clocked at 300,006 kilometres per second, about six km/sec faster that the speed of light, the researchers said.

"This result comes as a complete surprise," said physicist Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the experiment, known as OPERA. "We wanted to measure the speed of neutrinos, but we didn't expect to find anything special."

Why wait for results? They are just going to guess at the answer like the rest of us.

Latest Article

Question. If photons are being emitted constantly as well as neutrinos from supernova, how do you know when each was released and whether the ones you do detect were released at the same time as the photons without measurement data from the actual source?I say you can't, that one just "assumes" they are emitted simultaneously.

It is like an explosion. There is a pressure wave of energy that is emitted as a sudden burst.

The question now is if that burst releases neutrinos before, at the point of the explosion, or shortly after the explosion of photons.

Neutrinos would have to be the Souls moving freely.ds

Good comments, I enjoyed them. You reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend as a teen. We were talking about the "known" universe. I told him that I thought our universe was just a drop in someone else's ocean.

Yes, I have had conversations like that for years. Later on I read about some of the "theories of everything" that propose that our observable "Universe" is only one of an infinity of universes. Our human minds, being finite, have a tough time imaging what Infinity really means. It's like the idea that you can't really understand what it's like outside the box if all you do is look from within the box.

All I know is that Infinity is a really, really big place.

Infinity is not a really, really big place. Its always bigger.

I like to contemplate that our universe is a science project, which has been abandoned in the back of a teenager's wardrobe. Whilst I don't "believe" this explanation, I challenge anyone to prove it's not true...

After all, it explains the Deus Ex Machina who no longer visits....

Being a biologist, I can't reslst the questions in my mind about the structure of the universe and the role of neutrinos which I imagine because of my predisposition to see an integrative function in matter/energy as a whole.

I imagine those neutrinos are as integral to time and space as the blood flow in your body is to the maintenance of "matter and energy as we know it" or maybe as we don't know it as well.

Are there any experiments involving the conditions which are manifest in the absence of neutrinos? Or is that impossible? Because this would really tell us something about their importance.

Since neutrinos have only been discovered from 2 sources one man-made and the other from the fusion from the Sun, i doubt if they are that important at all to the grand scheme of things, since stars must have formed first to create the neutrinos, they did not exist prior. Forgot to mention they come from radioactive decay as well, but until compound molecules could form their could be no radioactive decay.

WOW, do I disagree with your discounting of their importance. I think time will prove they have a far greater importance than you see in them with your highly limited knowledge of what they are and capable of.

When the telephone was invented many people didn't see a practical use for them...that changed in time.

But what if everything is made of neutrinos, and they bind so tightly together to make the larger 'fundamental particles' that they only ever exist in the 'free state' after something such as a nuclear transmutation - and then they whizz away at ~c?

Chicken or egg?

A new article on the subject:

Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed

12:05 23 September 2011 by Lisa Grossman

Neutrinos: The key to a theory of everything

• 01 August 2007 by Marcus Chown
• Magazine issue 2615

Reluctant heroes

• 07 December 2002 by Frank Close
• Magazine issue 2372