A faster than light neutrino walks into a bar...

[Badboy]

And is asked if he wants a drink.

He replies: No thanks, JUST had one.


Badboy

[EskimoJoe]

 

I believe this was the thread from a couple weeks ago though  

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,320887.0.html

[Badboy]

I believe this was the thread from a couple weeks ago though  

Then it must have been going way faster than light

Badboy

[uptown]

ya better keep ur day job. comedy ain't for you. 

[saggs]

I kinda think all this faster then light neutrino hoopla might be a false alarm.  So far nobody else has verified the results from CERN. 

I'm confused by something else with this story too.
 
I remember a story a few years ago where scientists had slowed the speed of light to 38 mph by shooting a laser through some super-cooled-near-absolute-zero medium.  So if I am driving past the lab where this experiment is running at 45 mph, with light in the lab experiment going 38 mph...   does that mean I am traveling faster then the speed of light???    Back to neutrinos.... if C = the speed of light in a vacuum (says Einstein) perhaps the neutrino was traveling at C (the fastest possible speed of light) unaffected by some medium that was slowing the light, so does that = faster then light or not.   When CERN says it went faster then light, do they mean faster then C, or faster then the light in the collider?  (wait, is there light in the collider?)

I just don't get it 

[Brooke]

I remember a story a few years ago where scientists had slowed the speed of light to 38 mph by shooting a laser through some super-cooled-near-absolute-zero medium.  So if I am driving past the lab where this experiment is running at 45 mph, with light in the lab experiment going 38 mph...   does that mean I am traveling faster then the speed of light??? 

Nope.  Light travelling through a medium travels more slowly than through vacuum (or really, the front of the light wave is travelling slower than a photon in vacuum).  They are just slowing down the light through a particular medium to something really slow.  You travelling faster than does light in some non-vacuum medium has no consequences of violation of causality.

[Melvin]

CERN made a boo-boo. Relativity is safe after all.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27260/

Too bad, I was pretty excited by it. (Yep, I said excited.)

[titanic3]

Dip a ruler into a glass of water.

Technically, the light inside the glass is "slower" than the light around the glass, therefore, you see the straight ruler being "bent".

Light speed in a vaccum is 186,282 miles per second, approximately, but for the sake of simplicity, let's say it's exactly that.

Now in the case of the glass of water, you are not traveling faster than the speed of light, the speed of light is just being slowed down in THAT PARTICULAR space (the glass of water).

So if I am driving past the lab where this experiment is running at 45 mph, with light in the lab experiment going 38 mph...   does that mean I am traveling faster then the speed of light???

No, because if you were, then that means that you would arrive at a destination where it is pitch black because light has not yet reached that destination.

[RTHolmes]

Too bad, I was pretty excited by it.

 

[Jenks]

and Albert, the bartender, says  " Hey!  Whats the rush? " or  "Slow down!  Take a load off. " or "Sorry kid! You're a little light in the britches to come in here."

[COndor06]

Ok, So if I am in a car, in a vaccum driving at 186,282 miles per second and I turn on my headlights, will you see my headlights in front of the car?

[FLS]

Ok, So if I am in a car, in a vaccum driving at 186,282 miles per second and I turn on my headlights, will you see my headlights in front of the car?

No. You'd go by too fast and I'd be distracted by the lack of air.

[PuppetZ]

Ok, So if I am in a car, in a vaccum driving at 186,282 miles per second and I turn on my headlights, will you see my headlights in front of the car?

The speed of light, hereafter refered to as "c", is constant. It is "c" whatever the speed of the emitter/observer. So say you travel toward me while emitting beams of light, you will see them travelling away from you at "c", whatever your speed is. Now from my point of view, I still see the wave front trevelling at "c". The difference is when we see it relative to each other. Since you travel at exactly "c", I cannot "see" it per se before the wave front reach me. And since you are travelling the exact same speed, I will not see neither the headlight beam nor you for that matter until you smash me right in the face as both you AND the beam of light will reach me(I will enter your cone of light(that is the volume of spacetime that an object could interact with, given no information can travel faster than "c")) at the exact same moment accordg to my clock(not yours). This is pretty mind boggling, but keep in mind that these a phenomenon that are very hard to grasp as they go against pretty much all logic we experience in our life. This kind of "relativistic effects" are mostly reserved to sub-atomic particles. Also note that a physical object with a mass cannot reach "c" because of the relation between energy and mass (E=mc2). To accelerate an object, you have to give it energy. As the speed of a massive object(meaning an object with mass, be it a proton or a space ship) gets higher, a higher and higher amount of energy is converted to mass. So to accelerate to "c", a massive object would require an infinite amount of energy, which is impossible to achieve. You can get as close as you want to it, but not quite reach it.

Very interesting subject if you ask me.

[Brooke]

The most counter-intuitive realm of physics, to me, is quantum mechanics.  It is chock full of things that have made folks say "That can't possibly be true, because if that were true, this absurd thing would be the case."  Then folks finally get around to testing it, and they find that the absurd thing is actually the case.

Einstein, the man behind relativity (and, interestingly, behind some work that contributed to the early development of quantum mechanics), famously was not an admirer of quantum mechanics.

[AKP]

What happens if he orders a LIGHT beer?  Is he faster than the beer?  Is he out of temporal phase with it... preventing him from even picking it up?  Or... since he is faster than the beer that he just ordered, did he have it before he ordered it?