Talk:Faster-than-light

‹See TfM›

Apparent FTL propagation of static field effects

This section, interesting and important as it is, needs drastically reducing in size. Any suggestions? Martin Hogbin (talk) 09:50, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

There are physicists who really believe that static force fields violate special relativity when their effects "propagate" at speeds faster than light. Van Flandern has been saying for years that gravitational waves travel at c, but that static gravity travels at 2e10 x c. Which is (of course) ridiculous. [1]. But readers who dream of sending signals faster than c need someplace to go an ready WHY it's ridiculous to consider static gravitational fields (or static EM fields, for that matter) as "signals." If you think this section is too long, it may be time for a separate article for it, per WP:SS. SBHarris 03:30, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree that the section should be there and I do not want to support Van Flandern in any way. My complaint is simply that the section is too long. Maybe a separate article is a good idea, with a link from this one. Are you going to start one?Martin Hogbin (talk) 20:00, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I cut 2 kB out, since I find most of the info is in the {main} articles above. Feel free to cut any more that you don't think detracts from the understandability. If somebody slaps a "too technical" tag on this section, I'll refer them to you. SBHarris 21:03, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Deleted section by Bopomofo on good conductors.

I have deleted the above section, which was wrongly marked as a minor edit. It is based on what seems to be a highly speculative paper which has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Martin Hogbin (talk) 08:55, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Energy velocity above c

I took it out [2] because it made no sense to me. I think its a reasoning-by-analogy type thingy, if so it needs to be made much clearer, and lose the "Don't misunderstand to be drift velocity of the charge carrier which is much slower" bit WMC 21:18, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Neutrino - 50-60ms faster than speed of light

I lack the technical skill to add this but CERN or the research groups thereabouts measured neutrinos going 50-60ms faster than speed of light. 10ms margin for error. This is the second group to notice this, although the first time it was measured the experiment had a margin of error too high to make it conclusive.

They are calling for other groups to retry the experiment, which gives us 3 for three, and a possible confirmed discovery.

The implications of this are massive, rendering pretty much anything in the travel or communications area of science-fiction potentially into science fact. (ftl, subspace, possibly crazy stuff like hyperdrive/jump gates too since it could be used to sync both ends of the trip etc) Although likely prohibitively expensive.

It is also significant as a solid measurable particle (old faithful) can now do it, prior to this the only way the effect could be achieved is the less reliable spooky areas of quantum physics entanglement, states and the like.

At the very least in the short term, we now have a technology arc for lower latency communication research. Interesting times indeed.

NB - another article states its billionths of a second not millions(ms) (that's why its on the talk page!) still fascinating nonetheless.

ms would actually be milliseconds, which means thousandths of a second. In any case neither ms, nor "millionths of a second," nor "billionths of a second" are measurements of Velocity, or of velocity differences, at all. Billionths of a second over what distance? Jeh (talk) 02:01, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

If these results are confirmed, there will be plenty of time to update, not just this article, but pretty much the entire corpus of Wikipedia physics articles. For now there is nothing that needs to be done about it. Get as excited as you like, but don't change articles until there's more to go on. --Trovatore (talk) 02:07, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

It's actually 50-70 nanoseconds (60 nanoseconds with a margin of error of 10 nanoseconds). There are a bunch of online articles that could be used as sources. Right now, if you just google "faster than speed of light" and look at the news results, there are many possible references. Alphius (talk) 02:12, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Also, the distance this occured over was approximately 454 miles. Alphius (talk) 02:13, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

"Possible references" is not really the point. Even the guys who reported the results don't really believe them. The overwhelmingly most likely outcome of this is nothing at all; other groups will try to reproduce it, will fail, and the whole thing will be put down to some piece of equipment that was miscalibrated somewhere.

This is an encyclopedia, not a blog. We don't bend with every little breeze. I think there's an essay on WP:RECENTISM.

Now, it would be really really exciting if things come out any other way than the scenario I've outlined. Then at least we could reasonably predict that, even if not ultimately confirmed, the result won't be just forgotten (for example, cold fusion has been mostly debunked, but will not be forgotten), and it would be reasonable for us to cover it. Right now it's not. --Trovatore (talk) 02:23, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

According to Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=particles-found-to-travel), this event has actually occured over 16,000 times already.... Alphius (talk) 02:55, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Actually, the page on the Scientific American website was technically reprinted from Nature. Alphius (talk) 02:59, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 cyclosarin (talk) 03:17, 23 September 2011 (UTC)