Recently the scientific community has been shocked by the discovery of neutrinos apparently traveling faster than light. The discovery made by the Opera experiment (http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it) measured very clearly a difference between the expected time and the measured period. The difference was measured in sixteen thousand cases. The difference was six times greater than the margin of error that was taken into account. This means that by scientific standards the measurements done are valid.
You might therefore expect the scientists involved in the experiment to be pleased and excited by their new discovery however nothing could be further from the truth. They are calling upon their colleagues in the scientific community to please find mistakes in the way they have conducted their experiment. The reason is that if these particles can travel faster than the speed of light according to the theory of relativity they must be going back in time. Or in other words if you see a neutrino particle as a space ship the on board clock of the ship is running backwards. If this is possible it means that one of the most important principles in physics namely that of causality collapses. If this collapses scientists basically have to start from square one when it comes to defining correct theories that govern our universe.
I have to admit that I was also surprised when I read about the discovery (that still is to be confirmed by other laboratories) however suddenly an interesting idea came up in my mind that might shed a different light on what is going on. Einstein theorized that there should be something like a speed limit that no particles can break. He assumed that light particles traveled with that maximum speed. The reason is very obvious: Light particles - having no mass - have long been the fastest particles ever measured. So the speed of light was seen as equal to the maximum speed. Besides this it has also become clear that the speed of light slows down when light has to travel through substances like water. This seems to prove that the speed a particle can travel is not only limited by the mass of the particle but also by the amount of interaction a particle has with its surroundings. The latter in my humble opinion becomes important in the case of a neutrino that has very little mass and it hardly interacts with its environment. This led me to my conclusion that maybe we shouldn't conclude that neutrino's are violating the speed limit but that the speed limit of the universe is faster than the speed of light and apparently at least as great as 'neutrino' speed. If the speed limit in fact equals 'neutrino' speed instead of 'light' speed it means that the theory of relativity may still be valid (it then only has to be slightly adjusted). The only difference than is that we have to accept that light particles are not traveling with the maximum speed but extremely close to it. Neutrino particles might in this view traveling as fast as the speed limit and are therefore not traveling back in time! Maybe we should even go a step further and conclude that since neutrino's still weakly interact with the environment that even they are not traveling with the maximum speed but instead extremely close to it. The final conclusion should than be that only particles with zero mass that have to interaction with other particles can travel with a speed equal to the universe's speed limit. If this is all true then it also means that the absolute speed limit can be estimated but not be found since particles that travel with that speed can of course not be measured.
No comments:
Post a Comment