Particles break light-speed limit?

Kevin

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1

http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2169

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.

Perhaps the end of the era of the light cone and beginning of the era of the neutrino cone? I'd be curious to see your probability estimates for whether this theory pans out. Or other crackpot hypotheses to explain the results.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1

http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2169

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.

It clearly isn't universally understood, because if all physicists understood the universe in these terms, none of them would believe in a "collapse of the wavefunction", which is not locally related in the configuration space.

And just like that, Many-Worlds clicked for me. It's now incredibly obvious just how preposterous waveform collapse is, and this new intuitive mental model clears up a lot of the frustrating sticking points I was having with QM. C as the speed limit of information in the universe and the notion of local causality have all been a native part of my view of the universe for a while, but it wasn't until that sentence that I connected them to decoherence.

Edit: Wow, a lot more things just clicked, including quantum suicide. My priority of cyronics just shot up several orders of magnitude, and I'm going to sign up once I've graduated and start bringing in income.
Eliezer, if you have never seen The Prestige, I recommend you go and watch it. It provides a nice allegory for MW/quantum suicide that I think a lot of lay-people will be able to connect to easily. Could help when you're explaining things.

Edit2: Just read your cyronics 101, and while the RIGHT NOW message punctured through my akrasia, I looked it up and even the $310/yr is not affordable right now. However, it's far more affordable than I had thought and in a couple months I should be in a position where this becomes sustainably possible.

By the way, thank you. You probably know this on an intuitive level, but it should be good to hear that your work may very well be saving lives.

Username, you're having a small conversion experience here, going from "causality is local" to "wavefunction collapse is preposterous" to "I understand quantum suicide" to "I'd better sign up for cryonics once I graduate" in rapid succession. It's a shame we can't freeze you right now, and then do a trace-and-debug of your recent thoughts, as a case study.

This was a somewhat muddled comment from Eliezer. Local causality does not imply an upper speed limit on how fast causal influences can propagate. Then he equivoca... (read more)

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