Hi all, I'm sure you all know about the neutrinos travelling 20 parts per million faster than light at CERN . What are your thoughts ? Have CERN made a mistake ? A breakthrough ? If the reports are correct , then what can mankind gain from this knowledge ?

At first, I leaned towards some sort of dull error that would invalidate the result. But looking at it a bit more carefully, this seems increasingly unlikely. The reasoning is that there are only two measurement errors that are possible: the time the neutrinos took and the distance between the endpoints. The errors needed in either case are rather large (about 18m, by my calculations, or about 60ns). Not only this, but dozens of scientists have been more aware of this for months and desperately trying to find where the error was. It's not as if they were trying to prove neutrinos went faster than light, they were actually studying oscillations between muon neutrinos and taon neutrinos.

Hence, my feeling is there is a fairly good chance this is a genuine result. If it is, it is probably the biggest result in experimental physics for decades.

Perhaps it's a bit early to hazard a guess as to what mankind might gain from the knowledge!

I have heard nothing on this, when did it happen? Have you got a link to a website?

  Don't have a link handy but if you go to Yahoo, news, science you'll find 3 or 4 articles on it.

http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/neutrinos_can_go_faster_light_without_violating_relativity-82950  Perhaps this guy has it right.

I have been reading about this and for now I will stick with Occam's razor. What are the odds that Einstein and relativity are wrong vs measurement? Remember cold fusion?

read post five.

Post 5 is very interesting but so far I don't recall any proof of string theory's need for 11 dimensions, so I think any reference to String theory is, just that, theory. This is a "real world experiment" so let's keep the discussion to that. You can't invoke String theory for this experiment if there is no possible measurement.

But that could be evidence that string theory is true.

Perhaps, but again Occam's razor is more likely. My understanding is that String Theory is all but impossible to prove. How do you prove the existence of 7 more dimensions smaller than an atom?

it is based on feel, look at the universe. isnt it infinite with ideas and each idea is possible under one super idea that constains the infinite ideas. an absolute

Hmmm, how much " stimulant" have you had?

Maybe some explanations regarding the differences between theory of relativity and theory of quntum mechanics could be understood better in the future?

Enough to bring me truth that I have fed off in pursuit of higher knowing/wisdom. This is based off of consciousness; the level everything in the universe operates on. See the universe is in constant flux at every moment and based on what quantum theory has told us, consciousness affects the subtle components of our perception as well as the whole perception its self of course.  Our consciousness discerns the reality we chose and all the effects inherited. It happens with that perception we have, it reflects every effect we send upon it based on a reflection of ourselves and what we send out to influence other conscious matter/energy.. It literally works itself out beautifully with arability. such as a synchronization of two people thinking the same thing which is a phenomenal commonality of to subtle things in our reality that come together. That shows a deep connection on a level. Like I was saying a infinite reality with infinite probability unless we chose otherwise. A popular experiment that tested positive that the idea we manipulate what we see is the double slit experiment. when light goes through a slit and we don’t look at it it is an infinite stream of  every way it can go through the slit but when we do look at it our consciousness morphs the quantum stream of energy into another way (particle or wave).. In this sense we can control our environment  on the terms of how it influences us, aka what we pick up in perception. Thoughts I think come to us because our attraction fields are a certain way and we manipulate to have certain thoughts to who we are. Which is through feel and thought mostly. This again is done through the influence our consciousness puts upon the quantum energy forcing a image and perception that is better accepted to us, this quantum manipulation as I said before does not only effect a entire dense image but subtle aspects that make up the whole. The subtle manipulations that are so prominent are thought and the small intricacy’s. Which reflect really upon the whole.   And the fact that our conscious influences everything in the subtle way and more shows that we can do far more as we grow our Vibration: the energy we reflect on the universe. This is were faith and love are needed. to send total love into everything in the subtle way and this is were truth is found.

I was starting to think this group had fazed out. Glad to see a good response. For those who want to see the calculations . Goto CERN website, goto press release 23rd sept. You will find it and download the PDF .

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 . Then download the PDF

Post 16 has the correct link. Not peer reviewed. Haven't seen the Patzer on this.

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 Just because something isn't a "physical" dimension, doesn't make it any less real.  Accountants regularly solve problems involving more than one dimension, and no one would ever suggest that the numbers don't reflect actual, real-life situations.

 

The dimensions are folded away inside matter, but whether they are actual dimensions is irrelevant - we use the numbers to model what happens when matter interacts with other matter.  Calling those things "dimensions" is merely a convention.

More dimensions are needed to make sense of things like light, electrons and quarks. Well, unless you believe there is room in every single point of space-time to store lots of different numbers. 

And as for string theory "needing" all those extra dimensions, it turns out that the only mathematically consistent versions have very specific numbers of dimensions, leading to only one possible M-theory with precisely 11-dimensions.

Strange.