Interesting article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484

It would seem warp theory, as suggested by Zefram Cochrane, might be correct after all.

There was a theory of a family of faster than light particles called Tachyons which get get lighter the faster they go. Einstein said that our normal particles could not accelerate to faster than light. The same applies to tachyons slowing down to become sub-light. The amounts of energy required approach infinite.

That's refreshingly good science. They have a result which they can show consistently but can't explain with the science they have available so rather than just jump to a conclusion they're opening the results up to peer scrutiny.

As for tachyons, they do indeed behave as a 'mirror' to normal particles. However to hop from one side of the mirror to the other side in 'normal space' would require an infinite amount of energy as Amnesia says. I did read some work on a theory that what you end up getting if you do it (theoretically) looks very much like a 'wormhole'. The immense energy required caused warps in space-time very much like a singularity, so the scifi theory of traveling through wormholes to distant places in space has some at least theoretical basis to it.

So not necessarily warp speed in the Star Trek sense, more like the wormhole they have in Deep Space Nine. Star Trek FTL drive involves a PSB mechanism where they produce a bubble in which the value of c is locally higher, so you can go faster without actually going over the 'speed of light'. You effectively raise the bar for yourself.

There's a very good book - Michio Kaku's 'Physics of the Impossible' - which goes over the various theories on FTL travel without resorting to page long equations.

There is a possibility that a particle could transport from sublight to beyond light speed by using the same process that enables Scanning Tunnelling Microscopes to work, that is quantum tunnelling which is like a wormhole but it would be restricted by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It might allow one particle through but nothing larger because of the time allowed.

I've been waiting for this ever since Fermilab got similar results a few years back.

This is why I love physics.

Although it has to be confirmed, I'm presuming there is very little margin of error unlike the Ferminlab results (and hence why they weren't conclusive at the time), I could not believe this wasn't actually the main leading headline. Everywhere.

I mean, c'mon! Physics, and thus our understanding of the Universe, may be having one of its major overhauls for centuries!

Given that the universal constant c is the underlying basis for most of physics this is going to f*ck things up a bit.

The whole of special relativity goes out of the door.

The whole concept of space-time would be b*ll*cks and we'd have to start again.

This is like one of those Sudoku puzzles where you guess a number at the beginning and only get to the very end before you realise the initial guess was wrong.

The only way to correct the mistake is to undo it all and start again.

I predict this result will be largely ignored, the text books won't be changed. Move along, nothing to see here will be the order of the day, like most 'anomalous' data.

Yes, but this has been consistently "anomalous" for the past 3 years.

Um. Newton's laws being superceded by relativity didn't stop us putting geosynchronous satellites up in the sky or going to the moon. Relativity being superceded by quantum mechanics didn't stop us using relativity in interesting ways. Each set of laws operates within it's own boundaries and is applicable to it's own models. Each has been shown in many, many experiments to be consistent and valid and they will continue to be so. We have simply found now, as we did each time before, that the current theories we hold do not have an unlimited scope and if when we observe the universe outside that scope a new model is required.

If this experiment is truly valid (in general science practice, someone else has to perform a similar but not identical experiment and get analogous results first) what we have is another 'layer' of physics which may lead us to a greater understanding of how the stuff around us works. This of itself is wonderful. However it patently doesn't 'invalidate' anything that has come before. People are still taught Newtonian physics because it still works, provided you are aware of it's limitations.

The value of c is the speed light when it moves in a vacuum. That's its definition and that hasn't been changed in the tiniest part by this experiment. All theories and experiments which assume the value of c is what it was 10 years ago will still work just as correctly now as they did then.

Jon

Whisper it, but the whole cold fusion thing has been consistently anomalous for years too.
The US navy have been conducting research into it since the whole desk top fusion thing kicked off in the 90s.
But of course, we all 'know' that's nonsense too.

Newtonian physics is still pretty effective in simple situations, even though General Relativity explains Mercury's orbital motion, though it starts to fall apart at energy densities only found in black holes, and distances close to the Planck length. Hence the need for a theory of quantum gravity.

Well technically neutrinos can travel at the speed of light but since they can transmute into other flavours of neutrino so maybe they transmute to a tachyon?