There's a lot of buzz about the recent proclamation by CERN that they've found particles that are traveling faster than the speed of light. Specifically:
The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature’s cosmic speed limit.
If I understand the "20 parts per million above" correctly, that suggests then that these neutrinos are travelling about 13,412MPH too fast (the speed of light is 670,616,629.2MPH, after all).
To be fair, CERN is saying they think they're wrong and are trying to find the flaw in their math. They have rounding errors outlined in their release, citing their measurements to "within 20cm" and their timing to within "nanoseconds" (billionths of a second) which seems to me to be potentially enough to allow for millionths to enter in rounding calculations. Especially if they're using computers to do their math...heh.
In full disclosure, I'm no physicist, and for the most part, my recollection of this is as a generally savvy, former math geek, who's interest in such things has pretty much waned to the conversational.
Nonetheless, even when I was elbows deep in Calculus and my favorite application of it, physics, I thought the proclamation of "nothing can go faster than light" was absurd.
I've always thought it makes more sense to think that light has a maximum speed in a vacuum, than to think that the fastest thing in the universe is light. A kind of terminal velocity, if you will. Light just can't muster to go any faster.
Something other than light? It would have a different maximum speed.
A person falling to Earth from an airplane flying in its atmosphere will reach around 200MPH, give or take for how hard they try to be streamlined and air pressure and so on. In a vacuum, of course, there's no air to slow you down, so your maximum velocity would be dependent on your propulsion. Say you were drifting along in space, relatively stationary, and the moon's gravity grabbed you; if you had enough time to speed as fast as possible, you'd speed up to as fast as the moon could pull you , or its escape velocity, so you'd hit about 5000MPH. If the Earth didn't have an atmosphere to slow you down, in the same situation you'd hit about 25,000MPH before splatting.
If you're not falling, then your speed is dependent on the velocities gained by propulsions pushing and gravities pulling. They use "sling-shot" courses for space probes to use the gravity of space bodies, including the moons, planets, and even the sun, to speed up objects. For this to work, the angle has to be right, and the speed has to be able to exceed the escape velocity of the object (otherwise you'd be caught and either orbit or spiral in and crash).
Even that is relative. Since the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the distance from the object, to use the sling-shot effect, you only have to figure the escape velocity for the closest distance approached.
I've digressed...what I meant to say, is that a person falling in an atmosphere has a different maximum speed than a person falling in a vacuum. We don't have a neat, safe way to propel a person as fast as possible, so we can't as neatly establish a maximum speed for a person, as we have with light.
But where my digression has taken my mind is interesting. Consider the case of black holes. And not even just black holes, but super-massive black holes. So massive that nothing escapes, not even light. Consider then the escape velocity of such a black hole. It has to be at least as fast as the speed of light, but what if it's more? Wouldn't then light, which is traveling as fast as it can, directly approaching such a black hole (to avoid any energy lost in orbiting), have to then speed up to at least the escape velocity of the black hole?
Again, that relative escape velocity comes into play. There's a point where the gravity of a black hole, even a super-massive one, might affect you, but it's still far enough away that you can escape. As you get closer to the hole, there will come a point where you no longer have the energy to escape. With luck, you'll merely orbit; otherwise, you're going to end up plummeting into the black hole. Calculated for light, we call this the event horizon; the point at which "nothing" can escape.
What we have are some equations that we've successfully used to identify how fast something should be able to go. Our equations work with light, and almost everything we believe to be more massive than light. The neutrinos in question are subatomic particles, so they're pretty small. Perhaps they have less mass than light on their own.
An often misquoted or misunderstood E=mc2, the equation is based on the speed of light (squared), and the mass of the object, to give an inertial energy equivalency. That is an energy equivalent in a given mass. Finding something capable of traversing a vacuum faster than light doesn't suggest this conversion is inaccurate. It just means you can't use that object's speed for c in the formula. That's fair anyway; you wouldn't use the maximum speed of a person or rock or whatnot.
According to Wikipedia, 1 gram of mass has the same energy as 89 terajoules (or 89 followed by 16 zeros times one joule) when using the formula.This of course requires the complete annihilation of the matter, which is why we can't just harvest all of that energy from something abundant, like sand or water.
The calculation also changes when objects are in motion, too, especially at velocities approaching the speed of light, so our pedestrian understanding is short of fully understanding this theory when it comes to special relativity.
I guess alll of this blathering on simply counts as my one vote to say Einstein wasn't wrong. At worst, he is just very, very close.
