Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern

[lanceromega]

I don't know if gravity effects neutrino speed, but Gravity well subtracts energy from the photon and redshifts the light but does not change its observed speed. If neutrino and light were to get going at the same time and travel at the same speed, they would both cover the same distance in the same amount of time regardless of the gravitational well at the source, is that not so?

I was referring to the fact that energy propagation by means other than neutrinos would take its time to work its way up through the dense gaseous envelope of the star through shockwave propagation, and repeated photo emission and absorption by the material of the star's mantle. So it takes a few hours between when the core collapse, and when the visible surface of the star shows any optical indications of the calamity within. Thus visible brightening of the supernova would always occur sometime after the initial neutrino flux.

You are correct. My poor wording gave the impression that the speed of photons depended on gravity, which is not what I had in mind. Emission and absorption of photons would account for the gap between the arrival of neutrinos ahead of the photons. At least, that's what was the thinking when the supernova was discovered. Perhaps we might have to revise that too, who knows.

The report indicates CERN found neutrino to have covered 732 km 60 nano seconds, or 0.00000006 seconds faster than light. At accepted c of 299792.458 km/sec, light should have covered the said distance in 2441692 nano seconds or 0,00244 seconds. THis indicates neutrino traveled at 1+(60/2441692) speed of light, or 1 part in 40694 faster than light, which is a massive discrepancy unmissable if amplified over many light years.

That's correct, and that's why the Opera team is seeking other teams to verify their findings. The discrepancy is too large to be ignored.

Now perhaps some types of neutrino can travel faster than light and some can not, perhaps neutrinos speed oscillate about c so that it averages out to c over long distances. But I these are all ad hoc explanations whose weight can't be very high compared to the cumulative weight of the all the validation specific relativity has undergone in the last 90 years.

Should the findings be confirmed, some explanations will have to come forward and perhaps neutrino oscillation might be one of those factors that would play a key role. But right now, all that is speculation. We really don't know much about the weak force, or how would neutrino interact with quantum fluctuations, or even with gravity. This would open a whole can of worms.

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From what law do you make that assertion?

Then according to you, a photon cannot achieve the speed of light?

In post #13, I explained that massless particles like the photons can only travel at the speed of light.

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The most plausible explanation currently is that there's an error somewhere in the method of calculating the neutrino speed. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this goes the way of cold fusion. An exciting result, that ultimately turns out to be irreproducable.

That's my position too.

Or it can be that Neutrinos are in fact tachyons, back in the 90's several attempts to measure the mass of neutrinos yielded results that point toward the fact that they may have possess imaginary mass, which is the same mass Tachyon possess.

Any normal particle possessing a real mass would have varying velocities depending on momentum and kinetic energy, no experiment to date has have clocked a slow Neutrino. As a matter of fact the universe at large should have layer of Neutrino condensate occupying large potion of space due to the large outburst of neutrinos from the big bang, this layer of condensate should be detectable via gravitational effects yet no observation of this has occured.

If the Neutrinos are tachyons they could never be at rest, this would match all observation to date, Neutrinos from big bang would be the source of Dark energy that is causing the speeding up of inflation. Tachyons gain speed as they lose energy, which would occur as the cloud of neutrinos travel outward from from the intial singularty. The pressure from the accelerating neutrinos would cause universe to expand.

This same effect would explain why supernova neutrino are slower as they would actually be at a higher energy then those produce in the experiment, there velocity would be very close to that of a photon and almost appear to be traveling at speed of light and not faster.