Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Faster-Than-Light Particle Results To Be Re-Tested

No. We already know how to generate and detect neutrinos at will. If they travel FTL, then that means we know how to send messages faster than light = backwards in time. This means we can break causality at will. That is a hell of a lot more than a footnote, it would completely upset our entire understanding of the universe.

I think you're missing a step there:
1. IF we can modulate at will sources of neutrinos which travel faster than light
2. AND IF the interpretation of Special Relativity is true that claims that FTL speeds equal motion backwards in time
3. THEN we can transmit information backwards in time.

Further,
4. IF we can transmit information backwards in time,
5. AND IF transmitting information backwards in time allows us to reverse the choice to send that information backwards in time,
6. THEN AND ONLY THEN do we have to worry about causality violation problems.

It's an interesting problem because there's a number of assumptions in this chain of reasoning.

First, I know it's taken as an axiom by physicists that "FTL equals backwards in time because relativity says so", but I'm not sure why we should believe, a priori, that this is in fact the case. We're talking about interpretations of relativity, not the core guts of it - the Lorentz contraction, which is the observable part. Certainly if (1) were true and it turned out that we didn't get (4), then it would seem obvious that (2) is not in fact true. This wouldn't invalidate most of the predictions of Special Relativity, not its usefulness as a rule-of-thumb calculation tool, but it would invalidate the strict interpretation that nothing can ever ever ever go faster than light. It would just turn out that the Lorentz contraction is a dynamical, not a kinematic, effect - something which is generally true about large numbers of ordinary particles, but doesn't have to be the case for a few exceptions.

The general trend in high energy physics has been to see high-level "laws" as emerging from lower levels of reality which obey very different laws, and Einstein's wider relativity program for a Unified Field Theory never managed to describe the quantum world correctly. Why then should we assume that SR is exactly correct, and not just mostly correct? Einstein was smart enough to spot the problem back when he wrote the EPR paper; he believed in a fully real (ie non observer-dependent) world with hidden variables that couldn't send information to, say, update quantum correlations faster than light. Bell's Inequality proves that both of those beliefs can't be correct. We either have to throw away realism, throw away causality, or we have to throw away a hard lightspeed limit. Occam's Razor suggests that it would be a lot simpler to throw away the lightspeed limit than to throw away causality or realism, but ymmv I guess.

Abandoning a strict interpretation of Special Relativity as describing how time and space "really" behave doesn't mean abandoning all the observations built on it. For example, Oleg Jefimenko [wikipedia.org] has constructed equations which model the Lorentz contraction as a dynamical effect resulting from retarded electromagnetic emissions. The equations are a little harder to work with than the relativistic ones, but they appear to allow for a whole realm of FTL phenomena which is not actually violating causality. Some approaches to nuclear forces seem like they get a lot easier if you can postulate FTL signals at the scale of, say, inside an electron.

Carver Mead (the guy who, perhaps more than anyone else really did invent VLSI microchips, and thus is responsible for the computer you're reading this on) also has his own interesting approach to electromagnetism [wikipedia.org] which is much more quantum than classical. Intriguingly like Einstein's own vision of the universe as made of waves, n

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/iWJ7TMqaSlY/Faster-Than-Light-Particle-Results-To-Be-Re-Tested

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