299,297,458 Meters/Second -- A Mere Suggestion

This past week European scientists published the results of an experiment where neutrinos appeared to travel faster than the speed of light. Neutrinos, subatomic particles, that were created in CERN outside of Geneva, Switzerland, traveled 730-kilometers in 2.43-milliseconds to to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy. If you do the math, 730,000 meters/0.000243 seconds = 300,411,522.6 meters/second. Light speed in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters/second.

This is not a final word on overturning the speed of light as the ultimate speed limit. More experiments by other scientists over the next few years will either confirm this or invalidate this experiment. If it turns out that these neutrinos do travel faster than light, what are we to make of this? It should be noted I am not a physicist nor a scientist of any sort, but I like to follow these kind of things.

Many in the popular media said this could overturn Einstein's Special Relativity, which is one of the pivotal foundations that scientists have about knowing the universe. Special Relativity had its roots in the 1800s from the work of Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell. He developed the elegant equations that unified electricity, magnetism, and light. One of the implications of Maxwell's work was that the speed of light was constant. In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein took this observation about the speed of light, which was puzzling at the time, and made two proposals:

1. The laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform motion relative to one another (principle of relativity),


2. The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of their relative motion or of the motion of the source of the light. (from Wikipedia article on Special Relativity)

Uniform motion means traveling at a constant speed without speeding up or slowing down. There are a number of surprising results

1. When viewing someone else who is traveling at a different speed than you are you will see that their clocks are running slower than your clocks. Everything about them is running slower. The differences at speeds we are used to are very small so that we don't notice them. However, when you observe someone traveling faster than you at almost the speed of light, the difference is very noticeable.


2. When viewing the same person traveling at a different speed from you, you will see that their lengths aligned in the direction of motion are shorter. A yard stick or a meter rod will be shorter if held parallel to the direction of their motion. Again, this is not noticeable to our senses at speeds we are used to, but when the other person's speed is close to the speed of light, it is very noticeable.


3. For a variety of reasons, nothing can go faster, relative to you, than the speed of light in a vacuum. There are some known exceptions to this -- the most notable where space itself is expanding causing distant objects to move away from each other faster than the speed of light. It is even impossible to accelerate an object to the speed of light because to push an object to the speed of light would cause their clock relative to you to stop, their length to contract to zero, and their mass to become infinite.

Mass is a fundamental property of matter, the stuff that things are made of. In gravity, the force that pulls you down to the ground on earth, mass results in weight. Photons, the particles of light, have a "zero" rest mass, meaning that if a photon could stand still, it would have zero mass. Photons can go at the speed of light as a result. In fact, all massless particles travel at the speed of light. Neutrinos, on the other hand, have a very slight mass. Therefore, according to Special Relativity, they should travel slower than the speed of light.

So, what does it mean that the neutrinos in the CERN experiment were going slightly faster than the speed of light? I don't know and don't have the background to make an educated guess, but I'm going to do it anyway.

1. Special Relativity, and the theory that builds on it, General Relativity, will not be completely disregarded. Special and General Relativity have proved to be so useful in predicting things will see experimentally. It is used on some of our everyday technology, such as GPS satellites. Without the corrections made by the software in the GPS satellites, would GPS devices would not be accurate enough to be useful. What may happen is a revision of the underlying equations, the way General Relativity changed Newton's equations on gravity. General Relativity applied to objects traveling at "normal" speeds gives almost identical results to Newton's equations. In fact, NASA uses Newton's equations for all their spacecraft calculations, whether orbiting around earth, or going from earth to mars or elsewhere in the solar system. In a similar way, new theories and equations would probably under "normal conditions" give almost identical results as Einstein's equations.


2. We may find that neutrinos going faster than light only in limited circumstances. In 1987, a supernova was observed in an irregular galaxy that is close to our own Milky Way Galaxy (that is, compared to other galaxies). Supernovas generate a huge burst of neutrinos. About 3 hours before the light of the supernova reached us, a burst of neutrinos was detected. These neutrinos came when the central core of the star collapsed before the visible star explosion is seen. If CERN's experiential observations of the speed of the neutrinos is correct, and that speed holds under all circumstances, that neutrino burst would have been seen 4 years earlier. Warning, here is an Earl speculation: neutrinos may travel faster in a gravity field. I don't know why. Speculation: in gravity fields there are extra physical dimensions that provide a slightly shorter path for neutrinos to travel. Along that path, neutrinos travel slightly less than the speed of light, but the distance is shorter under stronger gravity fields. This might be a reason neutrinos don't interact with regular matter much. Neutrinos can happily travel through a light-year of lead and not be bothered but it because there are traveling in another dimension where the lead atoms don't reside. Perhaps neutrinos travel in this extra dimension and leak out to the regular 3 dimensions very infrequently. These extra dimensions would act like a "worm hole," a shortcut from our regular 3 dimensional space (4 dimensional when including time in space-time), but without some of the problems of true worm holes.


3. Earl Speculation: If we could measure time on the neutrinos at their point of interception in Gran Sasso, we would see that their time is negative from before the time they were generated near Geneva. From our point of view, these are neutrinos with times before they were generated. The clock in the neutrinos say they arrived in Italy before they left Switzerland. From the perspective of the neutrino, however, the neutrino would arrive in Italy after it was created in Switzerland.

Those are some of my thoughts for now. Take them with a grain of salt and consider the source.