Researchers at CERN break “The Speed of Light”

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Verifying some of what people have postulated about neutrinos:

https://www.thescienceandspace.com/2019 ... aaZA7qpsbI

Hmm ... that's only a 0.71 percent offset, which is well within instrumentation error.

Also, what medium did the photons and neutrinos pass through? If anything other than a complete vacuum, it would be expected that the neutrinos will arrive first, since they are not slowed by passing through matter, and photons are -- the speed of light in a vacuum is faster than the speed of light through any optically-transparent material.

Finally, "Science & Space" is a commercial publication, and not a peer-review journal. It would be interesting to read the actual data instead of an article based on a semi-official "leak" of the alleged news.

It's too soon to start phoning President Abraham Lincoln to warn him about John Wilkes Booth.

This story came out a few years ago, there were some mutterings about calibration, and then it all went quiet again. It’s a dodgy article, going on about Special Relativity, which applies to an inertia-less universe, so I fail to see how this applies to our reality. I’ve asked on other threads...

(like Relativitycoblers: viewtopic.php?t=801)

...just why C is presumed to be invariable in all frames of reference, but have yet to get an answer. As I see it, there is no reason to suppose this, and in fact, if you apply Ockham’ razor to the Michelson Morley result, the simplest analysis is that the light emitted travels at C relative to each emitter, regardless of that emitter’s path or velocity (there is no “aether”), which is sufficient to explain why they arrive at their targets simultaneously. When such a simple explanation is available, why invent complications like Lorentz transformations?

Last edited by gwynfryn on 06 Nov 2019, 11:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

Fnord, I should think they calculated the time for light travelling through a vacuum.

Interesting stuff, and maybe one of the embarrassing things about trying to wade into this, even with sincere curiosity, is that there's only so much going to to frame these sorts of things on a public or layman's level, I've seen tons of deep explanations of things like double-slit or quantum eraser but very little that really described what you're mentioning with much satisfaction, ie. what the velocity of light is actually doing that causes the sorts of counter-intuitive results like C or implying, at least in so many people's minds, a speed-limit to the universe. It's one of those topics that it seems like you almost need to be obsessively interested in (I've had that drive on some topics, sadly not science or math quite so much recently), or enough to get an advanced degree, to cut through the noise of conflicting opinions.

On another note I can see you've done a lot to think though these things yourself - that's something I respect a lot when I see people trying their best at it, especially on topics as 'on the edge of human comprehension' as these.

Why thank you techstepgenr8tion, but the subject isn’t anywhere near as daunting as you seem to think. Consider the following:

1/ Light was originally thought to be a wave form, which like any other, requires a medium to support it. Like waves in water, say, the wave is just an expression of the relative energy of that part of the medium relative to its neighbours, and the water molecules effected or not travelling as the wave seems to, but are mostly jiggling up and down, with perhaps another vector travelling independently of the wave. In sound waves, the air molecules are also fairly static, moving backwards and forwards relative to the motion of the wave. Sound waves, given static conditions, through any material, have a fixed velocity, and this is perhaps why light was believed to be the same. Here’s a puzzle immediately; sound wave velocity in air, say, is not fixed, but is in fact relative to temperature (nothing to do with being at sea level) so why shouldn’t light speed be subject to such changes?

2/ It was Einstein himself who demonstrated light is particulate in nature (the paper that won him his Nobel prize; few took his Special Relativity paper too seriously back then) so why cling to the idea that C is a universal invariable? Isn’t it more sensible to think of it like any other particle like a round from a gun, at least until evidence shows otherwise? If a stationary air fighter fires a gun while on the ground, the velocity of the round is much slower than one fired in flight, so shouldn’t light speed be determined not only by its velocity, relative to its emitter, but also by the velocity of the emitter?

3/ Many also seem to overlook the fact that it’s all about relativity (even “static” is a relative term). RT claims that when astronauts fly to the Moon, they are aging slower than the Earth bound, from their own point of view, but those astronauts can make observations too! From their point of view, it is the inhabitants of Earth who are travelling away at high speed, and so ageing slower, if the theory is true, but how can both statements be true at the same time? We have an immediate paradx, but it doesn’t seem to bother those who are clever enough to get a PhD in Physics!

4/ You may have already read about the principle of equivalence, which states that the same laws apply to energy paths, regardless of the material in which it happens. The reason early researchers in charged particles couldn’t find a velocity factor when trying to develop a formula to predict accelerations of said particles in fields, was because their equipment was wholly inadequate to show any such difference, and so they eliminated it. Physicists should now know better; as the speed of the particle grows closer to that of the field driving it, then the accelerating force reduces accordingly, as does the acceleration, which is what is actually observed. Just like the Michelson Morley result, there is absolutely no need to add complications like Relativity Mass; there is no such thing!

In short, RT addresses question that only exist due to wrong assumptions.

You may also like to look up another experiment claiming photons had been emitted from high pressure caesium at faster than C. One of the prize Puddings Head Doctors claimed it didn’t contradict Einstein as it wasn’t in a vacuum! It’s actually plausible, as very high pressures produce very high velocities in the molecules, and perhaps enough to be detectable.

This post does not make any sense.

Light travels either at the full "speed of light", or it travels at lsomewhat ess than the SOL. It travels at the full "speed of light" in a vacuum (like out in outer space) because its not going through any medium to slow it down (a medium being something translucent like air, or water, or glass, or a diamond.

So if the light photons in question are going through something OTHER than a vacuum then they would be mover slower than "the speed of light", not faster because they would be going through some medium. And were talking about the speed of the photons passing amongst molecules. If the "high pressure produce high velocity in the molecules" that's got nothing to do with the photons getting extra speed. Or if it has anything to do with it it isn't obvious how it does.

The dual wave/particle nature of not just light but many smaller particles seems to already do a lot of violence to intuition but the thing that gets worse on top of that is the idea that photons, by their speed, are in a state of timelessness even though the fastest they can go is 300 million meters per second which means that same light from millions of light years away, as the name implies, doesn't reach us for millions of years. Add on top of that the notions , at least as I've heard them explained, that light doesn't actually 'travel' through space so much as it's at its source and it's points of contact and yet it obeys C.

Its incredibly unsatisfying, and it feels a lot like like a story about planetary epicycles on Ptolemaic routes. It's a bit like someone's going to snap this into a new context in the next couple hundred years and it'll make way more sense but for now we're holding a bunch of disparate pieces and everyone's playing the academic game of who can come up with the wilder or sexier theory that explains the same data. Dark matter especially is a point of massive embarrassment - ie. the assumption that our figures plug in such a way that 96% of what's in the universe is stuff we can't see or detect. If I were to apply any intuition to that and especially with no one being able to actually detect any of it yet, my laymen non-physicist instincts are telling me that we've got something inside out in a way that's deeply consistent with the rule sets we're looking at, sort of like a Necker cube problem if we could mistakenly stuff it inside itself several times over.


Are you able to connect any dots with that though? For me, sort of like the double-slit experiment, that's sort of a floating datum, quite bizarre in its own right, that we have too little context for as of yet do do much with and it seems like a lot of dots need to be connected outward from it, ie. something we can actually make a cohesive reality out of, before it makes much sense.

Someone whose actually being irreverent enough for my tastes these days is Donald Hoffman. i used to not really get what he was saying or was worried that he was trying to foist sort of a Tom Campbell virtual reality theory but the more I've listened it's a different claim, something that goes back to acknowledging the sort of thing that people like Nima Arkani-Hamed suggest about space-time not holding under scrutiny (really underpinned by a fundamental set of geometries that are like neither space nor time but give rise to both), Hoffman suggests that it's a cognitive artifice (in his case for Darwinian fitness payouts) but it seems then like he's actually advancing a sort modular, stacking, functionalist take on mind or conscious agents that seems to offer a hypothesis-generating framework that's actually taking the growing 'neither space nor time are fundamental' consensus and properly running with it to see if that also jives with the possibility that we're trying to make space and time things that they aren't (like a unified solid reality independent of observers).


Are you postulating that photons come from a particular type of field or the reagents, like chemical or ion drive, and the limits of their fields? One of the things that bothers me about photons also - people seem to talk about all kinds of bizarre ways you can 'generate' them (even though they skewer space-time, that can't be quite right), it gets really obnoxious to follow because instead of grounding their claims they usually proceed to keep adding more without ever touching base with other intuitions or bits of common experience you can use to... well... BS test a hypothesis. While I get that some of that's benign, ie. they're nerds and nerds typically aren't good communicators, and they're trying to explore the extremes and find experiments that yield consistent results I worry that our interpretations and models are lacking from so much tunnel-vision in these fields. It might be that whoever can make the equivalent 'heliocentric' revolution in this area could quite possibly be someone doing meta-analysis rather than necessarily being in the trenches of field work largely because the fieldwork has incentives baked in that tend to continually force researchers out on the same trajectory for right or wrong, partly for keeping reputation and partly for keeping sources of funding which means doing work that the same paying parties find interesting.

That's my point; his claim that it doesn't contradict RT is laughable, if, IF, RT is valid. Are you unable to consider the possibility (nay, likelihood) that it isn't? Just why do you think that C is invariable in a vacuum? If photons were emitted at C relative to the emitter, it would be most unnatural for that to be the case! If the emitter is travelling at V relative to your static reference (another problematic question) than it would emit photons at V+C, so why should the V component disappear? When does it happen? What is the mechanism? Please don't bother me with the so called "proofs" of RT, as they all respond to other explanations.

techstepgenr8tion, we seem to be on the same wavelength on many issues, but it is too late in the day for me to consider much of what you posted (if only I’d been 50 years younger!). The “dual wave/particle nature of not just light...” is a cop out, to cover the fact that they are unable to come up with plausible explanations; I have no difficulty picturing how a particle (which is what light is) can produce “wave like” patters when reacting with matter at the quantum level. I do have difficulty with the fact that images can be sharply focused, when I’d expect a lot more scatter; it’s as if they can somehow influence the space they pass through to make it easier for following photons to stay on their track, but I have no mechanism to propose.

I’m comfortable with a space time mass continuum, as it explains what would otherwise be perplexing questions, such as if the Universe is finite, what is outside it. If existence requires all three to coexist, then any thought technique such as going to the outer edge of the Universe, and poking one’s finger through to feel what’s on the other side, is thwarted by the fact that your finger would be extending the Universe by the same distance. I rather looks like it is only a convention that everything we know of has something outside it, and this seems to confirm the old philosophical saw that nothing can be absolutely proven. The universe is the exception for which the outside has no existence.

We seem to have diverged in your last paragraph as I was referring to charged particles (massive, not photons. If you are not familiar with the principle of equivalence I think you’d find it both fascinating and useful, and should study it. I resolved one question about friction on a cable dragged through a conduit around an angle, and found the limiting angle by comparing it the hoop stresses in a pressure vessel (I kid you not)! As the laws governing the passage of electricity though junctions have their equivalents in those governing hydraulics, so should any object introduced into a field, a boat on a river, smoke from a chimney, say, behave the same way, i.e., by accelerating quickly to start with, then less quickly as the difference in velocity reduces. If charged particles were to accelerate uniformly regardless of velocity achieved (as most physicists seem to expect would be the case if relativistic mass didn’t prevent it) then they would be quite unique!

As for the illusion of time travel, I’ve addressed that here: viewtopic.php?t=377696

The clincher seems to be that they can fire one photon at a time, or one atom or molecule for that matter, and get the same wave pattern. The trouble is if it were ambient effects you should see some sort of sliding scale in the way this behavior works based on mass and firing up to 114 atom molecules through the apparatus would give us enough of a behavioral spread that we'd be able to map that trajectory on to something and figure it out. Either it's a really easy problem and there's a careerist embargo on the findings for the sake of a paycheck (not likely) or it's holding consistent across mass of the particles.

To some degree I'm having to wonder if this isn't an artifact of how our brains piece together reality. When the suggestion comes up that measurement collapses the wave to a particle, or bolder still - observation collapses it, it seems like there's a tacit claim that we're effecting the matter rather than resolving our perception of it. That third possibility is something we may need to take more seriously as a contender, especially because it would imply that we aren't actually collapsing anything but rather just affecting our own interaction with it (which seems much more parsimonious than mind collapsing probability vectors or an infinite and perpetual splitting of possibilities in an Everett complex with the number of particles in the universe factorialized in the way of universes splitting off every plank second).


I keep hearing people say something like (really dumbed down version here) space * time = N, ignoring any uneven conversion rates or other steps between. The suggestion seems to be that space and time trade off with each other proportionally and that you literally could not find the edge of the universe because you'd run into something like either near infinite time and no space or no time and near infinite space, stuff that our processing capabilities couldn't do anything with. Sir Roger Penrose actually uses this concept to explain his theory of aeons, ie. that after all of the stars go through heat death and then all of the black holes pop out due to Hawking radiation the universe attenuates to a degree that the vast nothingness catalyzes some sort of flip between time and space and thus another big bang comes out on the reverse side of it.


I think those sorts of analogies are indeed fascinating but they also seem to extend about as far as they do until such a time where we find something that we feel like we've mistaken the identity of, we get those impressions when the experiments don't bear out our categorization of them, and we do it all the time - part of why science is constantly breaking and remolding the parameters of philosophy.


Someone, I think over in South Korea if I'm not mistake, had a theory somewhat in contradiction to that of Penrose that the universe is constantly oscillating between expansion and contraction and that on the reverse matter would be gliding back through time toward its origin. I don't know how the merits of that theory shake out or don't, read it, found it interesting, and sort of threw it on the back burner.

It does seem intuitive that red and blue shift would just be the stretching or compressing of light waves. I'm still not sure how that compares to saying that when I'm riding my bike in a given direction time is thousands of years into the future in some direction ahead of me and if I turn around to go the other direction it's thousands of years in the past. If that notion came just from blue and red shift we'd be telling these guys to smoke less. The other thing about this, I'm pretty sure I remember there having been some experiments on satellites with atomic clocks where they were able to validate that the times on the clocks shifted by some very small fraction of a nanosecond. That seems to suggest that something is baked into the fabric of space-time that genuinely allows for this.

I think we really need to focus on figuring out how space translates into time, why the two are interchangeable to any degree, and we may really have to hit the problem of consciousness as hard as we can because we could only be so lucky, for easy science, that it's just a 'wetness of water' problem and it's much more likely that if we don't understand consciousness we'll all be ripping bong hits together talking about our newest and trippyest theory of planetary epicycles because we'll be completely oblivious to just how many tricks our senses and information filtering are playing on our ability to observe fundamental reality, or actuality / the noumenal, accurately. To say something really irreverent - it could be that the results of the double-slit are not so much a hallucination but rather something like the point of origin where our hallucination of what we call reality begins.

Ok. I get that what the guy quoted in your first post said is laughable. Light is supposed to go slower in a non vacuum, and not faster. So if light did go faster than "the speed of light" in a nonvacuum it would appear to be an even bigger contradiction of RT than if it did that in a vacuum. But its just one experiment.

But this second post of yours goes beyond that issue to your own points which are rather "laughable".

you're making yourself laughable by denying something without knowing the most basic thing about it.

"It" being Special Relativity theory.

The "basic things" are length contraction and time dilation (ie the Lorentz factors) that cause things at near light speed to act differently than the common sense ways they act at normal earth bound speeds.

Obviously if car A is moving at 100 mph, and car B is moving in the opposite direction at 100 mph each is moving 200 mph relative to the other. But if car A is a space ship moving at 90 percent of the speed of light while space ship B takes off from the same spot and moves in the opposite direction at 90 percent C, the relative speed between the two is not the common sense sum of the two speeds (1.8 times C). Time dilation and length contraction would slow the relative speeds between the two down to a sum less one C thus preserving Einstein's cosmic speed limit. Relative to each other they would still be moving at less than the SOL.

Likewise if you were driving comedian Stephen Wright's car at 90 percent of the SOL, and then turned on the headlights, the light coming out of the headlights would not be moving at 1.9 times the SOL. The light would still only move at the SOL (according to Einstein).

Its a free country. You can believe in Nessie, and you can deny Einstein. But if you're gonna do the later at least show you know the basics. This stuff you're saying about about combining velocity of light with the velocity of the light source are the first things that Einstein thought about while constructing special relativity theory. There is a term for it. The term is "the Lorentz transformation". So state it that way. Say that the "Lorentz transformation is wrong, and therefore it wont save your ass from breaking Einstein's cosmic speed limit. And here is why it is wrong". And then you present us evidence for how it is wrong.

Au contraire; the problems are far from easy, and that " …there's a careerist embargo on the findings for the sake of a paycheck (not likely)..." is the most likely cause of the way they try to create the illusion of progress! You mentioned how they release single electrons, etc, but just how is that possible? How can they be sure it happened? It may not all be consciously dishonest, but it seems to me there is far too much reliance on mathematically predicted outcomes that they then fail to distinguish from reality. Maths is a great tool, but just because it predicts a thing, it is not proof that the thing is real. Such erroneous assumptions compounded by yet more that are built upon them means that much of what is now presented as science fact, amounts to little more than wishful thinking!

SRT exists to try to explain for the assumption that light speed in vacuum is a universal constant. This is unproven. In fact, I know of no basis to even assume it is so!

Also, SRT refers to an inertia less universe. We do not inhabit such a space, so how can it be relevant?

If you could just concentrate on addressing these two point, and leave out your personal comments, it might become worthwhile to debate with you. Repetition of unfounded claims is not an argument.

That seems like a *really* easy thing to call BS on, I mean so easy that it never would have flown. People already wanted to discredit the double-slit experiment because of the problems it created and that would have been a wonderful case of woo-meisters or frauds trying to keep something alive that should have just been measurement error.

Someone else in this thread, or perusing it later, might be able to say a bit more about how one can fire a single photon, electron, or atom at a time and know that they're doing so, or worst comes to worst I could Google it later, but I'd have to say there's a certain line where even people with complete tunnel vision have no problems calling BS, even if its BS that suits them and especially fast when it's BS that doesn't suit them.