Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
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I just found this forum, and I love it!
Now on to the question.
I just recently read about superluminal particle testing in Italy, and the guys there seem to have used the accelerator to get particles past the speed of light, which completely contradicts the theory of relativity. Now we know as speed gets closer to the speed of light, time slows down. So here is my question, if these particles got very close to the speed of light, woulnt the time dilation cause the time of the testing equipment, clocks, ect to pass slower than the time of the particles themselves? If that's the case, wouldn't the test results be skewed towards a faster speed than the actual speed achieved by the particles. How can anyone measure the speed of an object when the time dilation between the test subject and the object in motion throws an additional variable into a simple equation? If S
*T, how do we determine speed if we only know distance, and the actual time it took the particle to reach the end, and the time (relative to us) are different?
If I am wrong, or missing something, please explain. This has been bugging me.
If I'm wrong, please explain why.
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You will love it less when you notice that there are almost zero replies from anyone here.
In regards to the neutrino result, from what I've read, they've gone over the results a total of four times, with more than one team, including reperforming the experiment once and the anomalous result stubbornly refuses to go away.
They definitely are taking account of the relative motions of the GPS satellites, and all the instruments have been calibrated very accurately. Simple mistakes like that can happen, but that's why the data has been reexamined so many times.
I still lean towards "experimental error" over "one half of modern physics is wrong" but I'm wondering what will come of it, personally. If we just suddenly stop hearing about it and it gets swept under the rug, we'll know what to think of physical review journal editors.
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I am sure they are taking all the actual relative motions into account. I don't think I explained the question correctly.
Let me use an example.
Let's just say your in your car, going down the interstate at 100mph.
Now, for the sake of argument, let's pretend the speed of light is 101 mph.
For what I understand, at speeds close to light speed, time dilation is exponentially evident.
So your in your car, and the watch on your wrist ticks once per second, but because of time dilation, the clock on the building your passing is only ticking once every 10 seconds.
So your speed might be 100mph, but the perceived time of the pedestrian is
10 times slower, meaning to them, it would appear you are going 1000mph.
So if the time of the particles is different than everything else we are using to measure, and we have no point of reference of the nutrino, how do they know the actual speed? Logic says that if the faster you go, and the slower time is, then your relative speed to the observer would just get faster and faster.
I have read they used particles with know half-lives, and fired them off in attempt to measure time dilation, but your talking about such infinitesimal peices of time, measures in such short burst, and trying to extrapolate data to accommodate for time dilation on a particle "supposedly" going faster than speed of light. It's got human error written all over it.
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this turned out to be human error, a (i think network) cable was not plugged in all the way causing unexpected latency when measuring how long it took for these particles to travel.
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"how do we determine speed if we only know distance, and the actual time it took the particle to reach the end, and the time (relative to us) are different?"
We measure the amount of time it takes the particles to travel a distance and calculate the speed of the particles.
In this case (due to human error) we measured a speed faster than light.
The particle's time is slow compared to ours (as it is traveling so much faster) but that doesn't change the fact that we, as an observer, should never see anything travel faster than light.
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