Neutrinos

Opera Experiment at Cern

The Opera Experiment in Cern was primarily about the discovery of new types of neutrinos such as the tau neutrino. For this purpose, a neutrino beam was sent 700km on its journey. Unfortunately, the scientists did not discover the desired elementary particles, but made another, exciting discovery. The neutrinos move at faster than light.

Wild speculation

Even @zeitonline picked up the topic and echoed the wild speculations that followed. There was talk of the end of Theory of relativity and the end of E = mc². Some scientists also suspect that the neutrinos are traveling through a new dimension.

Point of view by the absolute theory

Of course, the so-called faster than light of neutrinos does not bring Theory of Relativity down. At the time of Einstein, light was simply the substance with the highest known speed of propagation. That is why the letter c is also called the speed of light. But even the designation as c for constant suggests a different view. If you know the work of Minkowski, who, by the way, in contrast to Einstein, started from the physical fact of faster than light, you know that c is ultimately only the transition from the real number range to the imaginary number range. In the end, it doesn't really matter whether the highest speed is achieved by photons or by neutrinos. Accordingly, the absolute theory pleads for an increase of c to the now measured neutrino velocity.

Effects on photons

If photons did not have the real maximum speed, this would mean that they would have a rest mass because the relativistic root does not become completely zero. This would be an additional indication of the mass and momentum of a photon. I have already mentioned in this wiki, for example under Experiments, that elementary particles have quite different speeds, depending on their mass. The principle can be read under Anti-proportionality of locomotion and mass. If an electron and a positron arise from really 2 photons, as postulated and observed by Feynmann, the mass of these photons would be just as large as that of the electrons according to the Conservation of mass. You would be just as quick then. Of course the neutrino would then have a significantly smaller mass and would be correspondingly faster.

Bet that

I then made a bet with the @fischblog, one of the most famous science bloggers, for a case of beer that this result would be confirmed. He bets that the result, similar to NASA's attempt to live in arsenic, will be collected again by December 1st, 2011. Let's see who will be proved right. In any case, an exciting story and as I said under Experiments I said beforehand that elementary particles have different speeds depending on their mass, so that this result is now a possible confirmation of the absolute theory at Cern.

In the meantime I've won a box and in all probability I will lose one for it too, because after December 1st, 2011 I was still betting on the final result with the fish blog. The Icarus experiment, also in Cern, measured neutrinos again at the speed of light. The neutrinos are probably only slightly faster than photons. If you compare the energies: An electron has 511 keV, i.e. around 250,000 times a photon and is measurably slower. A neutrino, however, probably already has 0.2 eV energy, which is a tenth of the photon energy. We can then measure 250,000 times, but not yet the difference by ten times.

vacuum neutrino speed

I now have roughly an idea of ​​the dimensions of the relationship between mass and speed. If we define the earth as 0 km / s. Of course it moves too, but the light moves with it in the gravitational field. Then 10 ^ -35 kg results, the mass that light has corresponds to approximately 3 * 10 ^ 5 km / s. The neutrino is a power of ten smaller in mass, so there is a speed difference of 10 ^ 1 km / s. Neutrinos should therefore move in a vacuum at a speed of approx. 310,000 km / s. When making the calculation, one must bear in mind that neutrinos in the earth's gravitational field can also become significantly slower, just as light on earth is slower than in a vacuum. But that's the way things are.