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[Virex]

The speed of light is a very fundamental quantity, even a slight deviation would invalidate decades of research. It's not just the speed of photons in a perfect vacuum, it also defines the quantum levels of atoms and molecules, the time dilatation experienced by satellites, many magnetic phenomena, the stability of nuclei, the colors of lasers and even theoretical calculations of the efficiency of catalysts and solar cells. If C is actually wrong, we're going to have to redefine all other fundamental constants as well.

Esplain?

To boil it down to an understandable, layman's terms-esque format, at the smallest level we can currently "see", matter doesn't have to exist in only one place at once.

It's impossibly more complicated than that, but I'd rather not get that far in depth.  I'm sure there's plenty of information on the 'webz.  Mind, there's a lot of debate, but it's arguably the only way something could go faster than light, and such theoretically involved here too.

I thought that conventional information was still confined by the light speed? That is, collapsing a wave-function would cause effects (such as the location of a particle becoming  well-defined) to go faster than the speed of light, but those effects in themselves do not carry any information (The collapse of the wave-function has an essentially random result, meaning it carries no more information than the wafe-function originally carried). A neutrino appearing at a defined position is very much conventional information though...

How do you know the neutrinos are at defined points? Actually, shouldn't this whole thing violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? If position and velocity are linked quantities, and we know how fast its going... then we should have a very poor idea of what its location is. I'd figure it out, but I seem to have lost my physics notes

We don't know their true velocity, only their macroscopic velocity. Neutrino detectors can only detect locations. As such, we can calculate an average velocity from the time it took the neutrino to pass the distance between the point of origin and the eventual point of detection, but we cannot, as by the uncertainty principle, describe their exact trajectory (we assume it is a straight line for convenience and to avoid hurting our head, but it's actually a propagating quantum state) or the instantaneous speed at any point.

[Aqizzar]

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

"And of course the consequences can be very serious."

Fuck, CERN finally did it.  Light-speed exceeding black holes eating out the center of the Earth, here we go.

Damn you, science.

[Nilocy]

Thank fuck I'm not a physicist right now. I'd be dreading the years of potential work involved with redo'ing everything.

[Tarran]

Fuck, CERN finally did it.  Light-speed exceeding black holes eating out the center of the Earth, here we go.

No wonder I'm always hungry and short of 'blood'.

[Itnetlolor]

Sounds like light speed would be, in essence, a form of speed measurement, like KPH or MPH.

Alright Assholes, LUDICROUS SPEED, GO!!!

* Itnetlolor disappears in a flash of plaid

[kaijyuu]

I have an extremely easy way to test if this breaks causality.

1. Set up a neutrino detector thingy.
2. Write down a language to send messages with it.
3. See if you get any messages from the future.


If this speed of light breaking nukes everything we know about physics, you can be damn sure we'll be abusing it.

[Vattic]

Thank fuck I'm not a physicist right now. I'd be dreading the years of potential work involved with redo'ing everything.

Probably a mix of that and great excitement. One scientist I heard interviewed at CERN a few months back seemed to be hoping that whatever they discovered would upturn current notions and reveal an even stranger universe. If this is as ground breaking as implied it's going to make and break reputations.

[Nilocy]

I love discoveries that unearth more questions than they answer. This one, opened pandoras box of questions : D

[Willfor]

I have an extremely easy way to test if this breaks causality.

1. Set up a neutrino detector thingy.
2. Write down a language to send messages with it.
3. See if you get any messages from the future.


If this speed of light breaking nukes everything we know about physics, you can be damn sure we'll be abusing it.

This is assuming that things going faster than light actually do go backward in time. An assumption that could easily be broken while this line of research is shaking so many things up.

[forsaken1111]

I have an extremely easy way to test if this breaks causality.

1. Set up a neutrino detector thingy.
2. Write down a language to send messages with it.
3. See if you get any messages from the future.


If this speed of light breaking nukes everything we know about physics, you can be damn sure we'll be abusing it.

This is assuming that things going faster than light actually do go backward in time. An assumption that could easily be broken while this line of research is shaking so many things up.

Things which go faster than light actually go to chicago.

[Kirbypowered]

Fantafuckingtastic. There went your science.

Why did this happen? This must not be real.
Good thing we wont be able to use this for anything.

LUCID DREAMERS DO A REALITY CHECK

...Nope, not dreaming. Looks like you guys aren't part of my mind, darn.

This seems...I dunno, I'm quite baffled. I'm sure physicists are going to be having a wonderful time if this turns out being accurate. I am certainly interested.

[Jay]

(All of this is pretty much space fluff until some hard evidence can actually be gathered.  Spacetime is a highly complex, highly theoretical idea.)

Time is relative.
The object traveling FTL will have the effects of time upon them slowed.  Probably stopped.  POSSIBLY reversed.
However, it does NOT allow them to travel BACKWARDS in the "universal" spacetime.
I'm sure you're all familiar with a game that supports some form of time compression?   For those subatomic particles in the LHC, time IS being compressed.
If a clock were sent at exactly the speed of light for the entire journey, it would retain the exact same time as when it left when it arrived.  Time was, for that clock, and that clock only, stopped.
If we could move near or at that speed, we, too, could "time travel" forward.  But not backward.
It is impossible to go backward, unless we can somehow figure out how to move in negative spacetime.
We might be able to do that too, using black holes, but quite obviously we're nowhere near solving that particular puzzle.

[kaijyuu]

Heh, one of my pet peeves with science fiction that tries to be hard is when they say getting places will take a long time.

No, it won't take 4 years to get to the nearest star if you're going the speed of light. Not for you, anyway; to people on Earth and Alpha Centauri, yes, it'll take 4 years. For you? Trip will be finished in the blink of an eye.

[Ultimuh]

(All of this is pretty much space fluff until some hard evidence can actually be gathered.  Spacetime is a highly complex, highly theoretical idea.)

Time is relative.
The object traveling FTL will have the effects of time upon them slowed.  Probably stopped.  POSSIBLY reversed.
However, it does NOT allow them to travel BACKWARDS in the "universal" spacetime.
I'm sure you're all familiar with a game that supports some form of time compression?   For those subatomic particles in the LHC, time IS being compressed.
If a clock were sent at exactly the speed of light for the entire journey, it would retain the exact same time as when it left when it arrived.  Time was, for that clock, and that clock only, stopped.
If we could move near or at that speed, we, too, could "time travel" forward.  But not backward.
It is impossible to go backward, unless we can somehow figure out how to move in negative spacetime.
We might be able to do that too, using black holes, but quite obviously we're nowhere near solving that particular puzzle.

Does this mean we might be able to gain temporary immortality out of this?

[Fenrir]

If we could move near or at that speed, we, too, could "time travel" forward.  But not backward.
It is impossible to go backward, unless we can somehow figure out how to move in negative spacetime.

Throw the thing into reverse?