[ExI] Faster than light??

[john clark]

 On Fri, 9/23/11, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:

" The real issue, however, is whether info can be transferred at a FTL speed.
This would be an even bigger WOW, since it would mean that special
relativity can actually be breached"

If this experiment is valid (a literally astronomically large if) then, unlike the strange correlations seen in things like the Bell inequality experiment, neutrinos clearly COULD be used for faster than light communication, you could send a signal with them. It could be argued, perhaps, that relativity doesn't say nothing can move faster than light but only says that things that have real mass can't travel at the speed of light. Tachyons are hypothetical particles with imaginary mass and they ALWAYS travel faster than light, the faster they go the less energy they have. A few years ago there were several experiments trying to determine the mass-squared of the neutrino, and they all came up with a negative number, but most thought the error bars were too large to draw any huge conclusions from this; but a negative mass-squared is just what you'd expect from something with an imaginary mass.

As to whether neutrinos can send a signal into the past, once this question has been completely sorted out I'll post a message to the list explaining everything you'd ever want to know about it. You'll get it yesterday.

 John K Clark

PS: I wonder if China has banned news of this experiment.


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