[ExI] Faster than light??

[john clark]

On Wed, 9/28/11, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

 "if you could move particles with mass faster than gravity waves then you would presumably get an analogous divergence of gravitational Cherenkov radiation ("gravity shockwaves")." 

Perhaps not if the mass in question is an imaginary mass.

"  This likely precludes neutrinos from going faster than the speed of gravity waves, given that they have been observed to have mass."
What was observed was that neutrinos oscillate between its electron muon and tau flavors; the reasoning was that if it had no mass it would be moving at the speed of light and at that speed time would come to a standstill from its point of view so there is no way it could change from one flavor to another. So it must have mass. But of course if the neutrino was traveling not at but faster than light then time would start moving again, backwards. 

There have been attempts to directly measure the mass of the neutrino, or rather due to the experimental setup, the mass-squared of the neutrino, and they got a negative number. At the time everybody, including the experimenters, thought these absurd results were a sign that the experiment was a failure, but we all know what you get when you square an imaginary number.

  John K Clark


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