[ExI] Faster than light??

[john clark]

On Fri, 9/23/11, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

"Ethan Siegel points out that the experiment has already been done on a
far larger scale and found no FTL effect."

Well yeah, if the neutrinos from the 1987 supernova moved as fast as the ones in this new experiment they would have arrived on Earth in 1982, 5 years before the light did, but that didn't happen. However (and I'm just playing devils advocate here) its possible that supernova neutrinos were ultra powerful and so moved just an infinitesimal amount faster than light, but the man made neutrinos were much less energetic and so moved much faster. Weird stuff like that happens with imaginary mass, the faster it goes the less energy it has, at infinite speed it would have zero energy and at light speed it would have infinite energy. So there would be no way to slow down something with imaginary mass so it moved slower than light because that would take infinite energy.  So the two experiments don't necessarily contradict each other.   

  John K Clark  


Quote:
Supernova 1987A, which took place in the Large Magellanic Cloud
168,000 light-years away.

This supernova was discovered, optically, on February 24, 1987. About
three hours earlier, 23 neutrinos were detected over a timespan of
less than 13 seconds. The reason for the 3 hour delay? When the core
of a star collapses (in a type II supernova; see here), most of the
energy is radiated away in the form of neutrinos, which pass freely
through the outer material of the star, while the emission of visible
light occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface.

However!

Even if you assume that the light and neutrinos were created at the
same time, but the visible light moved at c and the neutrinos moved
faster than light, which is why they got here first, know what value
you'd get for the speed of these neutrinos?

1.0000000020 c, which is inconsistent with the results from the OPERA
collaboration.

So some reservations about the FTL effect should be held pending further data.


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