Roll over Einstein: Pillar of physics challenged

Originally posted by consciousgod
Why doesn't an electron's mass approach infinity as it scoots along just under the speed of light?

It needs an infinite amount of energy you mean to say.

Originally posted by consciousgod
Shouldn't a neutrino traveling faster than c have a mass equal to more than the mass of the universe?

That means you would be creating something with an immense amount of gravitational force. What do you think would happen in that case?

I bet that they have a measurement error: The northernmost part of the LHC travels slower on the surface of the earth (due to earth rotation) than the southernmost part. The particle does not follow a circular path. In their published paper they did not mention exact coordinates of the start and end points of measurement: A piece of data that would have been necessary to compensate for the effect of a rotating earth.


-rrr

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by sapien82
What I want to know , if light can escape a black hole can a neutrino ?
since now it is shown to travel faster than light

You meant if light CAN'T escape, right?

They only checked their own measurements for 6 months and nobody else has confirmed it with a replication, so I wouldn't say it's been shown with much confidence, in fact confidence in the scientific community is quite low.

But if it travels a hair faster than light, the difference is so small, that for all practical purposes for most black holes, we know of, no, it probably wouldn't escape any more than light would. The reported speed just isn't much faster than the speed of light. Maybe in isolated unique exceptional cases it could happen but as a general rule, if the light can't escape, the neutrinos probably can't either.

It means that the Schwartzchild radius for neutrinos would be a little smaller than for photons.

Harte

Originally posted by LilDudeissocool

Originally posted by consciousgod
Why doesn't an electron's mass approach infinity as it scoots along just under the speed of light?

It needs an infinite amount of energy you mean to say.

Originally posted by consciousgod
Shouldn't a neutrino traveling faster than c have a mass equal to more than the mass of the universe?

That means you would be creating something with an immense amount of gravitational force. What do you think would happen in that case?

The Lorentz equations cover time, distance, and mass dilation. When the mass approaches infinity it takes an infinite amount of energy to move the infinite mass.

But this isn't the point. Electrons traveling at .9999999962c should have a much larger mass than an electron moving at 0.1 c, but we don't see it.

Why not?

This says electrons have been documented with speeds of 99.99999962% the speed of light, but the atoms moving around us move at 2200km/s or less than 1% c.

education.jlab.org...

The Lorentz Transformation factor for an electron moving at .9999999962c is 11,470.8. So the mass of the electron clocked at 0.9999999962c should be 11,470.8 times the mass of the electron moving at 0.1c.

This is not observed. Why?

Stereologist? Time to show your genius.

reply to post by consciousgod


Mass dilation has been measured in many fundamental particles, including electrons.

Mass Increase - skip to the section called "Mass Really Does Increase with Speed"

Travelling at 0.9999999962c, an electron should have a relativistic mass, as you say, about 11471 times greater than it's rest mass, or 1.045*10^-26 kg, as opposed to its 9.11*10^-31 kg rest mass. This is about the mass of a Lithium atom. I wouldn't call that huge. And this has been observed.

reply to post by consciousgod


Let me be more explicit then. You meant to say, "Mass–energy equivalence" E = mc^2 does not create energy. What you are saying the way I read your text is that internal mass is created with speed. So where is the extra internal energy coming from to produce the "infinite" mass?



Ditto what CLPrime said.

reply to post by LilDudeissocool


Weeellll...it kinda does. Generally, in Relativity, energy is conserved in 4 dimensions (spacetime), which, given the inconstancy of time, can mean the apparent magical appearance of energy/mass with increasing velocity.

It looks weird on paper, but, if you did the calculations in a Riemannian 4-space, it would all work out.

reply to post by CLPrime


I seen an E=mc^2 poster hanging on a wall in my 8th grade science class where a man was running on a treadmill pushing a wheel barrel (an original one, a wooden barrel with a wheel that simply said "bottomless" on the side) powering a water pump that filled the barrel. I guess one could be made too depicting a balancing scale where the same barrel could be placed on one side of the scale and weights representing c (the hand placing them there representing energy inputs like the man's legs running on the treadmill) placed on the other side with a lever valve underneath of it operating water flow through a hose or pipe filling the barrel.

You know it didn't click at the time what the poster was illustrating until a year later in ninth grade E=mc^2 was explained in detail in class.

There is a law of an acute diminishing returns at play obviously with E=mc^2... not to confuse econ terms with physics although the equations are the same.

Now where does the water come from?

PS

I guess the greatest part of the illustration is that it gets the mind to thinking about a point in "time" where you could never run fast enough, or add weights to the scale, to overcome the increases in water flow. Time does not move fast enough for us to overcome the paradox. However the energy input efforts would move increasing faster in relation to the barrel being filled, and thus the flow of water into the barrel would lesson in relation to the efforts of increasingly filling it. So if the hose or pipe could be tampered down on the input end so to speak, breaking the light/time barrier, sounds like it could be possibly overcome through the laws of time dilation. Though being physically connected to a point in time, a frame of reference in time, to another seems impossible to accomplish. Time dilation creates an impossible barrier to overcome between two points of reference. In lay terms that is what E-mc^2 really is saying.

reply to post by rickyrrr


Thats why I advocate that all future phsyics endeavours and experiments be carried out in space and not on the surface of our planet.
As we are no playing around with forces which I think we dont comprehend it would therefore be better to play around with the particles in space away from our planet in case SHTF !

Think star trek red matter on planet vulcan!

Originally posted by sapien82
As we are no playing around with forces which I think we dont comprehend it would therefore be better to play around with the particles in space away from our planet in case SHTF !

Whether we comprehend it or not is not as important as the fact that we can measure the energy of cosmic rays and determine that some are far more energetic than anything the LHC can produce.

So if highly energetic particles are problematic, the ones from space would be the problems, not the much less energetic particles from the LHC.

Having said that, doing the experiment in space might have other benefits besides more safety, like more accuracy, so I'm not opposed to the idea. But in a way, we already DO have data that came from space on neutrino emissions from supernovae. We can measure when the neutrinos arrive and when light arrives. The greater distance to the supernovae should amplify the speed difference of the neutrino to something much greater than the 60ns seen over the 730km distance on Earth (like maybe 4 years!). Yet we haven't observed such a long delay between neutrinos and photons from supernovae. That's one main reason the results of the Earth based experiment are suspect.

Faster Than Light Neutrinos? Don't Bet On It.

The neutrinos from SN1987A traveled so far that had they been moving that much faster than light, they would’ve arrived here almost four years before the light did. However, we saw the light from the supernova at roughly the same time as the neutrinos (actually the light did get here later, but it takes a little while for the explosion to eat its way out of the star’s core to its surface, and that delay completely accounts for the lag seen).

So I'd say the fact we didn't see a 4 year lag from SN1987A is a major problem for anyone who thinks the CERN results are really faster than light, rather than just a measurement error.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Nice find! Totally makes sense.

I was also thinking that the title of this thread (extremely pompous IMHO) needs to be changed to:

"That are still small bugs that need to be fixed in GPS".

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I pointed this out a little while ago, but think about that for a second...

If neutrinos are found to be travelling faster than the speed of light, then that means they are violating one aspect of Special Relativity.
If they are violating one aspect of Special Relativity, then they are also violating all aspects of SR that are either causes or effects of that one aspect.
In the case of the speed of light limit, the causes are time dilation, mass dilation, length contraction, etc.
So, if the neutrinos are violating the speed limit, they should also be violating these other aspects.
Therefore, in the case of any particle observed travelling faster than the speed of light, we should expect to see no time dilation.

We can't pick and choose what parts of SR we hang on to... we either obey it all, or we violate it all.

Now, back to reality... the supernova results do most certainly show that neutrinos travel, at most, at the speed of light (and likely slightly below the speed of light, since they probably have finite, though still experimentally negligible, rest mass).

reply to post by LilDudeissocool


If you don't mind, I'm gonna pull a buddhasystem here and split some hairs.

E = mc^2 in no way results from or in mass or time dilation. You'll notice, it lacks a velocity term.
The full equation is E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2, with velocity, of course, being contained within the system's momentum. When rearranged, this results in mass dilation.

I do understand, though, that E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2 can be rather tedious to write out all the time.

Originally posted by davidchin
I was under the impression that the speed of light was a "limit", not a "barrier". Which means that no physical entity could reach the speed of light. I recall working some equations back in college on contracting dimensions and increases in mass for objects travelling close to the speed of light, and upon examining the equations that we were given (probably simplified for us "unsophisticated" undergraduates), it seemed to me that teh equations also worked for objects that travelled at speeds faster than the speed of light. For such faster-than-light objects, they could never slow down to approach light speed due to the same dimensional and mass restrictions, and were forever destined to go much faster that light but somehow never able to slow down.

Are there any physics majors who might be able to address this?

The speed of light was an assumed limit by Einstein in order to resolve disparities between Maxwell's equations on electromagnetism and classical mechanical dynamics. The speed limit was essential to the theories of Special and General Relativity and further refined in the addition of Minkowski space-time. This means that if something moves faster than the speed of light, it can invalidate all these theories. In relation to your question, Einstein's transform equations are predicated in the use of the Lorentz Factor of l = 1/sqr(1-v^2/c^2). If anything does beyond the speed of light, this factor becomes imaginary. This means that the transform equation of Einstein for length, mass and time become imaginary if an object moves beyond the speed of light. Some have suggested that it means that the objects become anti-objects. Mathematically they become imaginary objects outside the real system. Physically, no one knows what an imaginary object is unless it's the kind you dream up. As it stands, due to this discovery, one primary axiom in Einstein's theories has been broken (light speed limit) which has put ALL things Einstein are on trial including the use of the Lorentz Factor.

reply to post by buddhasystem


I tend to agree.
But there is evidence that gravity 'works' much faster than light, it is not bound by relativity.
It is certainly IMO not due to 'gravitons' or any such thing.
Tachyons, then, do they exist?
Apparently so, but only at FTL speeds, if you slow them down or stop them, they cease to exist
I think Carl Sagan's little film about Flatland proves the point conclusively; add an extra dimension and anything is possible. For sure we know very little about the universe...

Originally posted by CLPrime
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

I pointed this out a little while ago, but think about that for a second...

If neutrinos are found to be travelling faster than the speed of light, then that means they are violating one aspect of Special Relativity.
If they are violating one aspect of Special Relativity, then they are also violating all aspects of SR that are either causes or effects of that one aspect.
In the case of the speed of light limit, the causes are time dilation, mass dilation, length contraction, etc.
So, if the neutrinos are violating the speed limit, they should also be violating these other aspects.
Therefore, in the case of any particle observed travelling faster than the speed of light, we should expect to see no time dilation.

We can't pick and choose what parts of SR we hang on to... we either obey it all, or we violate it all.

Now, back to reality... the supernova results do most certainly show that neutrinos travel, at most, at the speed of light (and likely slightly below the speed of light, since they probably have finite, though still experimentally negligible, rest mass).

You are right in this, but i still theorize that the particle is not always a mass, and therefore has nothing to do with SR in that state.

Originally posted by CLPrime
I do understand, though, that E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2 can be rather tedious to write out all the time.

We use the system of units where c=1 for a reason

reply to post by buddhasystem


Indeed we do. E² = m² + p² is much more pleasing to the senses. So long as we know that c has been set equal to 1...which is why I try to avoid "natural" units at all costs. But, that's one of my little quirks. I do appreciate their usefulness.

I hate to be the one to say this, but it's not that simple.
You are assuming c to be a constant (which it is not) and giving it the number '1'
Which textbook says c=1
If you tend to avoid using natural units that's a shame, because it is the international standard of units that defines everything in terms of it's dimensions (mass, length, time etc).
This enables us to analyze just about everything by breaking it down into it's component dimensions,
hence the term 'dimensional analysis', which is not only simple algebra but a very powerful engineering tool.

Dimensional Analysis

This is standard 'A' level physics, i might add.............