# BBO Discussion Forums: The neutrinos from the future... - BBO Discussion Forums

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## The neutrinos from the future... Faster then c?

### #1akhare

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Posted 2011-September-22, 17:52

foobar on BBO
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### #2whereagles

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Posted 2011-September-22, 19:19

interesting... if it gets confirmed, it's major news
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### #3semeai

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Counting modulo five

Posted 2011-September-22, 20:06

Crazy. Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so none of us should really believe this yet. It would be very exciting, though.

According to their measurements, it sounds like the neutrinos were going roughly 299800 km/s compared to roughly 299792 km/s for light.
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### #4JLOGIC

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Posted 2011-September-22, 21:55

Dammit I came here to post this lol
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### #5JLOGIC

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Posted 2011-September-22, 21:55

I can't wait to travel back in time, it's only a matter of time... or is it?
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### #6mike777

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Posted 2011-September-22, 23:31

faster than light

effect before cause

2 photons occupy the same space and time

the smaller you go the more space there is.

aint the universe full of wonder.
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### #7hotShot

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Posted 2011-September-23, 04:30

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### #8JLOGIC

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Posted 2011-September-23, 11:48

I knew John Titor was not a hoax!!!
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### #9hrothgar

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Posted 2011-September-23, 11:53

Particle man, particle man
Doing the things a particle can...
Alderaan delenda est
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### #10y66

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Posted 2011-September-24, 07:46

Guess what?
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again. Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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### #11Winstonm

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Posted 2011-September-24, 08:03

The neutrino did not speed up; the observer slowed down.
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. - Herb Stein
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### #12gwnn

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Posted 2011-September-24, 11:53

Lorentz transforms are just too cool to be false.
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### #13BunnyGo

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Posted 2011-September-24, 11:58

gwnn, on 2011-September-24, 11:53, said:

Lorentz transforms are just too cool to be false.

But they're just the 4-dimensional projections of what are really going on. Maybe neutrinos jump through another dimension.

(I'll still take the bet that this is a measurement failure)
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### #14barmar

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Posted 2011-September-24, 22:04

When I first heard the story, my first thought was that there might be some quantum tunneling going on. But if this is a possibility, I can't imagine the scientists wouldn't have thought of it, it's way too obvious. Quantum dynamics causes a number of behaviors that appear to violate relativity, such as black holes giving off Hawking radiation (due to spontaneous creation of a particle and its antiparticle just outside the event horizon -- one of them falls in, the other zips away).

### #15BunnyGo

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Posted 2011-September-25, 01:56

barmar, on 2011-September-24, 22:04, said:

When I first heard the story, my first thought was that there might be some quantum tunneling going on. But if this is a possibility, I can't imagine the scientists wouldn't have thought of it, it's way too obvious. Quantum dynamics causes a number of behaviors that appear to violate relativity, such as black holes giving off Hawking radiation (due to spontaneous creation of a particle and its antiparticle just outside the event horizon -- one of them falls in, the other zips away).

Unless you're using the same term to refer to two different things, quantum tunneling isn't a way of traveling faster, it's a way of escaping energy wells (i.e. if a particle is "trapped" in a place requiring more enegy to escape than the particle has it can "tunnel" it's way under the energy hump).
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### #16helene_t

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Posted 2011-September-25, 05:29

BunnyGo, on 2011-September-25, 01:56, said:

Unless you're using the same term to refer to two different things, quantum tunneling isn't a way of traveling faster, it's a way of escaping energy wells (i.e. if a particle is "trapped" in a place requiring more enegy to escape than the particle has it can "tunnel" it's way under the energy hump).

I think barmar had wormholes rather than tunelling in mind? At least that was my first thought. But it isn't plausible.
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### #17blackshoe

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Posted 2011-September-25, 09:31

Whatever they're doing, if they aren't carrying information (for example "Ron Paul Wins!" ) they're useless.
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### #18Gerben42

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Posted 2011-September-25, 10:08

Well if it's quantum tunneling, the average particle would still arrive just in time. Even if you would for some reason only see the "too early" group, you would see much fewer particles than the total number of particles that were sent.
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### #19babalu1997

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Posted 2011-September-25, 11:47

damn you all smart!

Free, on 2011-May-10, 03:57, said:

Babalu just wanted a shoulder to cry on, is that too much to ask for?
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### #20barmar

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Posted 2011-September-25, 20:18

I'm not an expert on quantum theory, but I thought that tunneling could essentially allow a particle to disappear here and reappear instantaneously somewhere else. We call it tunneling because the interesting case is when somewhere else is on the other side of some barrier, but it could just as easily be just some distance away. Quantum processes allow things like this because it's about probabilities and statistics -- individual particles can do almost anything, but if you have lots of them they average out to the macroscopic expectations.

But it sounds like the scientists were measuring the speed of a stream of particles. Tunneling, if it works like I thought, would perhaps allow a few individual particles to jump ahead of the pack, but the stream as a whole should obey relativity. Unless they can tag individual neutrinos and detect their arrivals, I don't think they'd be able to detect this.

I don't even know how they measure the neutrino speed in the first place. I guess they transmit a very short burst of neutrinos, and then detect when they arrive. But neutrinos are extremely hard to detect, so the burst must have lots of particles in it, and they'll only detect a small number of them arriving. Maybe some of the tests detect the particles that tunnel ahead. But I'd expect them to repeat the test many times and average the results, to filter out quantum effets.