Speed of light slower than we thought?

Probably not
Einstein not wrong, except in headlines
By Richard Chirgwin, 1 Jul 2014
With the simple headline Einstein was wrong, yet another piece of questionable phy
sics has garnered world attention.
It starts with this kind of canned statement, which originated at Phys.org and a
pparently arose from this uncritical write-up at the Medium-hosted Physics at Ar
xiv blog.
To quote Physics at Arxiv, James Franson at the University of Maryland in Baltimo
re ... has used the laws of quantum mechanics to calculate the speed of light tr
avelling through a gravitational potential related to the mass of the Milky Way.
His conclusion, in this paper at IOP, is that both Einstein's prediction of the
speed of light 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum is wrong, and light tra
vels slower than we thought because photons can split into slower electron-posit
ron pairs before recombining as a photon, in a process called vacuum polarisatio
n.
How to test this? Franson has based his work on a conundrum raised by an old sup
ernova explosion: that when supernova SN 1987A was observed in 1987, neutrinos w
ere spotted 7.7 hours before the event became visible when photons arrived.
Since both neutrinos and photons should have arrived at the same time, Franson h
as decided that it's the speed of light that's at fault, rather than our underst
anding of supernovae and that's given rise to Einstein wrong!-type stories at note
d science journals The Huffington Post, The Inquisitr, The Daily Mail, Extreme T
ech, and IFLScience.
The Register decided to ask an astrophysicist, Dr Brad Tucker of the ANU (whose
work has been discussed here previously), who urged a more sceptical view of the
study.
The basic problem, Tucker told Vulture South, is that of the two phenomena Frans
on's paper discusses, the speed of light is well understood and has been experim
entally verified over decades, while even astrophysicists don't fully understand
supernova explosions".
SN 1987A is the best-studied supernova ever, because of its close proximity. Howe
ver, we classify it as peculiar because it does not fit into our broad categorie
s, Tucker said in an e-mail. The difficulty in understanding SN 1987A, he said, i
s one of the things that tells astrophysicists we have a long way to go.
He suggests that one of the oldest principles in science, Occam's Razor (roughly
, among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be sele
cted), is being ignored in the rush to slow down light.
The speed of light has survived every test thrown at it over decades, he explain
ed, but Franson has loaded his analysis with extra assumptions to demonstrate th
at the speed of light is wrong (and therefore, every calculation it's used for i
s also wrong).
A less-polite analysis at this blog points out that Franson's original paper has
idled along at Arxiv for three years without much notice. Only the combination
of IOP acceptance and Physics at Arxiv promotion, it seems, have elevated the pa
per to an international headline.
The Register also notes that Franson's scepticism about a 1:10,000 chance that t
he mysterious neutrino bursts were nothing to do with the supernova isn't enough
of an improbability to discount the idea we don't know what's going on in SN 19
87A.
For example National Geographic gives the likelihood of an individual being stru
ck by lightning in the USA in any given year as 1:700,000 however, that means th
ere are more than 400 such events annually.
Which is why science doesn't consider discovery of a particle to be established un
less the chance of coincidence is at five-sigma, or 1:3.5 million.
With the simple headline Einstein was wrong, yet another piece of questionable phy
sics has garnered world attention. It starts with this kind of canned statement,
which originated at Phys.org and apparently arose from this uncritical write-up
at the Medium-hosted Physics at Arxiv blog. To quote Physics at Arxiv, James
COMMENTS
9 days ago
Tom 7
Silver badge
Did Einstein predict the speed of light?
Or was it Maxwell and his silver hammer?
1
9 days ago
CommanderGalaxian
Boffin
Reply Icon
Re: Did Einstein predict the speed of light?
Einstein recognised the significance of what Maxwell had stumbled upon (and prov
ed) - that the speed of light is a constant - no matter what, not relative to an
ything (people kept asking the question 'constant relative to what what?'. Einst
ein through his theories of relativity explained why it isn't relative to anythi
ng. 0
2
9 days ago
NotWorkAdmin
Reply Icon
Re: Did Einstein predict the speed of light?
Sorry - exactly wrong. SOL is always constant relative to an observer. So you ge
t the same value regardless of whether you're moving towards or away from it. Un
like tennis balls.
Best way to get a reputation in science would be to disprove Einstein, so it's n
o wonder people keep trying. Which shouldn't be taken as me saying don't try, ju
st be pretty damn sure before you publish.
1
2
9 days ago
TechnicalBen
Bronze badge
One of these things is not the same as the other...
The travel time of a beam of light/photons and the speed of light in a vacuum ca
n be different. Because you can "stop" the beam/photon and re-emit it. A neutrin
o though is less likely to be interfered with as it is so small and weakly inter
acts.
Basically, it's the difference in the theoretical limit "my car can do 150mph" a
nd the "but I'm stuck in traffic doing 1mph" limit. :P
8
3
9 days ago
Martin Budden
Bronze badge
Coat
Reply Icon
Re: One of these things is not the same as the other...
What is the maximum velocity of your car* in a vacuum?
*while being driven by a sheep, of course.
6 0
9 days ago
SW
Boffin
Reply Icon
Re: One of these things is not the same as the other...
Zero - unless it's one of those new fangled electric horseless carriages.
4 0
9 days ago
Turtle
Silver badge
Reply Icon
@Martin Budden: Re: One of these things is not the same as the other...
"What is the maximum velocity of your car* in a vacuum? *while being driven by a
sheep, of course."
Assume the sheep is a sphere...
3 0
9 days ago
itzman
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: One of these things is not the same as the other...
Umm. IIRC light can be refracted by gravitational masses, but neutrinos...what p
ath do they take?
Well they have mass so should also be bent by strong gravitational fields en pas
sant, but to the same extent?
My A-level physics gives up at this point.
Also light slows down when passing through matter, but neutrinos do not I believ
e?
3 0
This post has been deleted by its author
9 days ago
Trigonoceps occipitalis
Reply Icon
Re: @Martin Budden: One of these things is not the same as the other...
The sheep is in a vacuum. Spherical, cube, what difference does it make?
(Never the less made me laugth.)
8 days ago
Michael Wojcik
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: @Martin Budden: One of these things is not the same as the other...
The sheep is in a vacuum. Spherical, cube, what difference does it make?
Moment of inertia and angular momentum. Think, man, think!
8 days ago
Imsimil Berati-Lahn
Reply Icon
Re: @Martin Budden: One of these things is not the same as the other...
"Assume the sheep is a sphere..."
... with zero rest mass, neutral charge and a spin of 1/2.
2 0
7 days ago
Acme Fixer
Reply Icon
Re: One of these things is not the same as the other...
The thought occurred to me that we are observing a small fraction of a milliradi
an(?) of the light coming from the SN. Suppose it took 7.7 hours for the light t
o find a clear path through the debris from the SN, but the neutrinos weren't ha
mpered at all by the debris. Simple explanation, no?
6 days ago
TechnicalBen
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: One of these things is not the same as the other...
That is the actual theory so far. That the neutrinos escape before the light as
the light gets caught up in debris, clouds etc.
No idea why I got downvotes. If I misspell something, or get some facts and deta
ils wrong, please correct me, I'm no genius that is for sure and not afraid to b
e told so.
9 days ago
John Tserkezis
Silver badge
Ok, so they're fine-tuning the speed of light, that means that the measuring equ
ipment and techniques in early-ish 1900's wasn't as good as 2014. Yes, that's sh
ocking, but true - 100 years DOES make a difference to accuracy.
That doesn't make Einstein "wrong", he just didn't factor in some guy farting in
Thailand, to affect the weather in Canada. 0
12
9 days ago
d3rrial
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Not really, the speed of light is very well established. Actually the speed of l
ight is so well established, that it is defined as a constant and will never eve
r change from 299,792.458km/s. Any differences in measurement will not change c,
instead it would change the definition of a metre.
11 0
9 days ago
dan1980
Silver badge
Reply Icon
I think the conjecture is that the photons were emitted at the same time as the
neutrinos but were slower to reach us.
If so, that's not saying so much that the 'speed of light' - as a constant - is
not quite as big a number as was thought but saying that the speed of light (in
a vacuum) is no longer the ultimate speed limit. I.e. - neutrinos move faster th
an the 'speed of light'.
Revising a measurement is one thing, but saying that that measurement no longer
represents what you thought it did is quite another.
Is that the gist?
4 0
9 days ago
Ian Yates
Reply Icon
That's an interesting point: while I agree that a metre is defined as the distan
ce light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second, arguably a metre as
it exists at this point in time is more important than the accuracy of that cal
culation, in terms of the impact to society as a whole. i.e., if we (hypothetica
lly) did discover that the speed of light is slightly different (as John suggest
ed), wouldn't it make more sense to change that formula to keep the metre the sa
me, rather than having to adjust all of our measurements?
Too early?
2 0
9 days ago
phuzz
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Even if we're not quite right about the speed of light, any correction would be
very small. We do have almost 100 years of measuring it, and the results are all
pretty similar.
9 days ago
Sir Runcible Spoon
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Perhaps the Neutrino's took a short cut?
1 0
9 days ago
PBelc
Silly question...
I don't know much about this stuff but do neutrinos get effected by gravity as m
uch as light? If light is bent by gravitational pull, surely light would have fu
rther to travel than the neutrino which has more of a direct route.
2 0
9 days ago
frank ly
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: Silly question...
As I understand it, light (photons) are not affected by gravity. Space itself is
distorted by gravity and so it looks as if light is deviating from a straight-l
ine path.
7 0
9 days ago
DaLo
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: Silly question...
Light is affected by gravity - that's why there are 'black holes'.
5
2
9 days ago
Mike Bell
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: Silly question...
Photons and pretty much everything else is affected by gravity because gravity d
istorts the very spacetime continuum itself. Large clusters of distant galaxies
act as a 'gravitational lens', for example, distorting the image of galaxies tha
t lie beyond them.
4 0
9 days ago
itzman
Silver badge
Headmaster
Reply Icon
Re: Silly question...
Mutatis mutandis....
I thought Reg readers would have been aware that 'what is' and 'what our models
of it are' were in fact different things.
"The map is not the territory"
5 0
9 days ago
dan1980
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: Silly question...
@frank ly
Within General Relativity, gravity is not really a force in the same way as, say
, the electro-magnetic force - it is more a result of the curvature of spacetime
by massive bodies.
Essentially, the Newtonian idea of the 'force' of gravity is (under Einstein) si
mply a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime, as influenced by mass or, mo
re precisely, the 'stress-energy tensor', which is effectively a combination of
mass, energy and momentum.
In other words, the curvature of spacetime that results in the apparent 'bending
' of light is gravity.
Of course, Neutrinos are affected by gravity too! (And would be even if they wer
e massless.)
3 0
9 days ago
dan1980
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: Silly question...
At low relative speeds, Einstein's equations effectively reduce down to the Newt
onian formulation of mass acting on mass. This works fine for celestial bodies m
oving at tiny fractions of c - the Earth, for example orbits the sun at ~1/1000
c. Of course, Newton's model can't account for light because light moves at 100%
of c!
Thus, light is not affected by gravity as modelled by Newton but that model was
explained by Einstein as essentially a special case of the larger picture, which
is General Relativity.
1
1
9 days ago
tony2heads
Bronze badge
Boffin
Reply Icon
Re: Silly question...
Both are affected by gravity but
- neutrinos hardly interact and go 'straight out'
-light will interact with any matter in and around the supernova and will take s
ome time to get out. How long depends on a lot of detailed understanding that we
might not have got right.
for example photon diffusion time (getting absorbed, re-emitted in random walk s
tyle ) from the sun's core to its surface is estimated to be about 170,000 years
, despite its radius being about 2.3 light seconds.
4 0
9 days ago
Blitterbug
Bronze badge
Thumb Up
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Re: The map is not the territory
Thumbs up for the Van Vogt / Korzybski reference.
9 days ago
alannorthhants
Mushroom
A basic misunderstanding of supernovae
Franson has based his work on a conundrum raised by an old supernova explosion:
that when supernova SN 1987A was observed in 1987, neutrinos were spotted 7.7 ho
urs before the event became visible when photons arrived.
While we do not completely understand the physics underlying a supernova (the si
mulations show the shock wave stalling a few milliseconds after it rebounds from
the collapsed core), scientists do pretty much agree that:
1. The neutrinos are generated during the initial core collapse;
2. The photons are generated when the shock wave reaches the surface of the star
; and
3. The two preceding events are separated by several hours.
I guess Franson must have assumed that everything happens instantly. Just shows
what an idiot he is.
22
4
9 days ago
Paul Kinsler
Reply Icon
Re: I guess Franson must have assumed ...
If it's on the arXiv, you dont have to guess. You can go check it yourself. Or i
ndeed you can check the open access article itself, using the links in the Reg a
rticle.
2 0
9 days ago
Gordon 10
Silver badge
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Re: I guess Franson must have assumed ...
As you could have too instead of posting about it..... Gander meet sauce. 0
2
9 days ago
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
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Re: A basic misunderstanding of supernovae
There's certainly an idiot here, but it's not Franson.
If you'd read anything beyond the El Reg write up -- you don't even need to read
the original paper, even some of the "Einstein wrong!!!" press reports got this
part right -- you would know that this El Reg's cockup, not Franson's.
Yes, it's well known that there should be some hours between the arrival of the
neutrinos and the photons. The problem with SN1987A is that the difference is se
veral hours longer than our best theories of supernovae say it should be. Franso
n's proposal deals with that discrepancy quite neatly.
Whether he's correct remains to be seen, but if we're going to call somebody an
idiot, I nominate the person who used the words "guess" and "assume" about a wel
l-established physicist rather than read one link deeper.
5 0
9 days ago
CommanderGalaxian
Flame
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Re: A basic misunderstanding of supernovae
Franson isn't questioning the speed of light. What he is actually saying, is tha
t over those sort of distances, you can't consider space to be a true vaccum - y
ou have to take into account quantum mechanical effects. Only an idiot would acc
use him of being an idiot without first bothering to RTFM.
1 0
6 days ago
TechnicalBen
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: A basic misunderstanding of supernovae
Ahhh... so he is "just" (though said in context, a lot of hard work goes into im
proving data and results) improving the theory and info about why the light take
s so long to reach us. Not replacing it entirely (as that would be going against
established observations and theories).
I do wonder, what other effects can the quantum mechanics, this "no true vacuum"
cause?
9 days ago
chivo243
Joke
If gravity bends light...
then does heat bend light? And, is the speed of darkness just slightly faster th
an the speed of light? I've never been able to hit the light switch and be under
the covers before it's dark!
1 0
9 days ago
DropBear
Bronze badge
Joke
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
Of course Einstein was wrong - this whole "photon" malarkey will soon go the way
of the Aether, once people finally realize the whole process is about dark bein
g sucked instead of light being emitted...
2 0
9 days ago
Mike Bell
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
Does heat bend light?
In its own way, yes, it does. An oasis mirage would be one example. Hot air and
cool air have differing refractive indexes, which bends an incoming light ray by
varying amounts.
9 days ago
Paul Kinsler
Reply Icon
Re: does heat bend light?
heat is energy, and energy bends spacetime, and light beams follow curved paths
in curved spacetime. So yes, heat does bend light.
1 0
9 days ago
Captain DaFt
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
The speed of dark is obviously faster than the speed of light as you can demonst
rate with a simple experiment:
Open your closet door. You can see light enter the closet, but dark moves so fas
t that you can't see it leave.
As for the heat question, Radiant heat is just another form of light, but shifti
er, as it doesn't let us see it. Who knows what it's up to.
Conductive heat is just agitated matter. Some photons, usually from the shifty R
adiant heat mentioned above, seek to keep matter agitated. Most respectable phot
ons just move a little faster when they see agitated matter, they don't want to
get involved.
Convective heat is just conductive heat trying to escape the gravity of the situ
ation, therefore the same rules apply to it.
Sexual heat is the odd situation where intellect has shifted from between one se
t of limbs to between the other pair. This may cause passing photons to stop and
stare, usually yelling "Get a Room!"
So, as you can see there is no easy answer to that question... Er, what was it a
gain?
11 0
9 days ago
amanfromearth
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
Move the light switch to be under the covers.
Not that big of a deal.
9 days ago
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
"And, is the speed of darkness just slightly faster than the speed of light?"
Cosmic distances are fascinating. The light from our sun takes a finite time to
reach us. If it disappeared suddenly - we wouldn't know until about 8 minutes la
ter. What really knots my mind is that apparently the effects of the sun's gravi
ty would also only disappear after that time.
1 0
9 days ago
Domeyhead
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
The comment about dark sucking is straying close to the theories of De Selby and
his "dark particles" (a prize to the first person to identify the reference)
9 days ago
phil dude
Bronze badge
Joke
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
I believe they would be coincident...? Although, it would be a fascinating exper
iment....
Planet pool, anyone?
P.
9 days ago
John Gamble
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fas
t light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting
for it."
Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett
2 0
8 days ago
Joe91
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
The Dalkey Archive -- Flann O'Brien -- wonderful madness.
8 days ago
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
Reply Icon
Re: If gravity bends light...
The Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien --- quite brilliant madness
9 days ago
Destroy All Monsters
Silver badge
Headmaster
What am I reading?
"His conclusion, in this paper at IOP, is that both Einstein's prediction of the
speed of light 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum is wrong"
1) Einstein didn't "predict" the speed of light. That speed has to be measured.
It is always 1.
2) He correctly posited that the most elegant way out of the pretzel-shaped cont
ortions that physicists were making to adapt their theories to the logical impli
cations of electromagnetism and the absence of any experimental sign of an absol
ute rest system in which light was moving was to go whole hog and posit that the
speed of light must be the same in all reference systems. Which means that dura
tions and lengths differ between reference systems
3) Quantum mechanics comes in later, whereby you can have "faster than light" ev
ents in the small (resolved by changing to antiparticles in other reference fram
es) and the world-famous "entanglements" (which have nothing to do with any spee
d at all, except the speed of thought).
2 0
9 days ago
All names Taken
Bronze badge
Alien
Tsk!
It's all relative in it?
9 days ago
Tom 7
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: Tsk!
A mother generally.
Page:
7 days ago
Scroticus Canis
Bronze badge
Reply Icon
Re: Tsk! - "It's all relative in it?"
Oh, absolutely.
9 days ago
Mike Bell
Bronze badge
Neutrinos
Didn't someone discover a few years ago that neutrinos actually have a very smal
l but non-zero mass?
It was found that neutrinos can change 'flavour' on their journey. And if they c
an change, they must therefore be travelling at less than the speed of light. Be
cause at the speed of light, null time passes, and no change would be possible.
If a neutrino had zero mass, it would have no option to travel at anything other
than the cosmic speed limit, speed of light.
If you flick a bowling ball with your finger, it's not going to move very quickl
y. If you flick a marble, it's going to belt off a lot faster because it's less
massive. If you flick something with no mass whatsoever, e.g. a photon, it's goi
ng to move as fast as is cosmically possible (subject to any interfering medium
in which it is travelling). You might ask yourself the question why doesn't it m
ove off at an infinite speed? Then things get quite complicated, and intuition l
ets you down. You will see the photon move off at the cosmic speed limit, but th
e photon itself will experience no time on its journey.
There's quite a good article about the constancy of the speed of light here.
2 0
9 days ago
volsano
In a Vacuum
One issue is that interstellar space is not a vacuum. It has a few atoms here an
d there, but they add up. So the speed of light through it is not necessarily as
high as c.
The calculations may well be inferring the refractive index of space in the line
of sight between us and the supernova.
2 0
9 days ago
Mage
Silver badge
Facepalm
Maxwell
Later Einstein.
The guy is making weird assumptions. Every measurement has backed Maxwell's and
Einstein's Theories and Predilections arrived at from different directions.
We need to know more about Super nova. Observations should be from a very safe d
istance.
9 days ago
Cipher
"Einstein was wrong...
...sells papers. All kinds of papers...
I suspect that neutrIno emission ahead of photon emission is the place to start
a critical review of this work.
9 days ago
Wade Burchette
Reply Icon
Re: "Einstein was wrong...
Saying Einstein was wrong is nothing new. 100 scientists once said Einstein was
wrong and wrote a book about it. Albert Einstein said that if they were right th
ey only needed 1 to prove him wrong.
1 0
9 days ago
4ecks
Joke
Maybe
Neutrinos are less flamboyant than Photons, perhaps they don't slow down for eve
ry paparazzi opportunity or stop to take selfies, hence the difference in arriva
l time. ;)_
9 days ago
Francis Vaughan
Speed of light != c
There is no contradiction, just a surprise if this pans out.
Einstein said that there was a fundamental speed - c -. As it turns out, a massl
ess particle is constrained to travel at c. So photons should travel at c. Howev
er if there are interesting second order effects that make the effective path tr
avelled a little longer, well the measured speed over a large distance (one that
can't see these effects) will see a slightly slower speed.
The big problem for casual reading of all this is that for most people, c and th
e speed of light are thought of as synonymous. They are not. c is the fundamenta
l. It may be that c is indeed a very very tiny fraction faster than we see photo
ns travel, at those scales we are able measure over. No big deal here at all. So
rt of a neat result, nothing more. Indeed, the current understanding of why the
measured speed at macro scale might be different requires that Einstein still be
perfectly correct. What we gain is understanding of just how weird the vacuum i
s.
Back when Einstein worked out the physics, only light was known to travel at c,
so there was no reason to differentiate the fundamental from the speed of light
as an exemplar. Neutrinos have been assumed to be another massless particle, and
so should also travel at c. Although their mass is currently an open question.
We don't talk about the speed of neutrinos as a metric. Yet why we should talk a
bout the speed of photons as a metric is no less specific. It is simply an accid
ent of history that we use light as a surrogate for c. That there might turn out
to be a curious feature of the QED and the nature of the vacuum that makes the
measure of a photon's speed on a macro scale slightly slower, is just a nice res
ult.
3 0
9 days ago
phil dude
Bronze badge
Boffin
speed of light...
My understanding is that the speed of light is the maximum, because that is the
mechanism for the propagation of fields. The concept of vacuum was invented to a
llow this definition to be precise. Hence, speed of light in vacuum is c. Speed
of light in jam <c. Tachyons(?)>c.
Only, since then (19th century), we now know the vacuum is not empty, but a "see
thing quantum foam", so it appears that things can get slower, just not faster -
and the fastest thing we know is a photon.
Although it has not been measured (to my very amateur knowledge), I believe that
if the sun was to disappear the loss of gravity and light would be simultaneous
. If the sun exploded, the shockwave would probably take hours/days...any astrop
hysicists want to chip in with real numbers?
My understanding of this article was the SN model was not correct...
P.
9 days ago
Francis Vaughan
Reply Icon
Re: speed of light...
"because that is the mechanism for the propagation of fields."
Ugh. Light isn't the mechanism for propagation of fields. Photons are the manife
station of the propagation of the EM field. The other force fields propagate by
other force carriers. Not all of them travel at c - only the massless carriers.
A field is nothing special - simply something that can be measured throughout 3
dimensional space. The fields that defined the fundamental forces are a bit spec
ial, but again, only the EM field involves photons.
1 0
9 days ago
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
Reply Icon
Re: speed of light...
I once asked an academic astronomer about the sun disappearing. He said it would
be about 8 minutes before we saw the light go out - and the gravitational pull
would then simultaneously disappear.
Presumably at that point the Earth is on a new slingshot trajectory rather than
an orbit - so any shockwave would be chasing us.
However if the sun merely exploded then some/all of the mass is now an expanding
cloud. So - would that cloud have the same gravitational pull on the Earth as t
he same mass formerly coalesced into a ball?
9 days ago
phil dude
Bronze badge
Pint
Reply Icon
Re: speed of light...
Excuse my lack of precision. I meant the fields set the speed. By definition all
fields must propagate at the same speed.
Which fields don't travel at c?
Here's a beer to help ;-)
P.
9 days ago
Francis Vaughan
Reply Icon
Re: speed of light...
One suspects you mean classical force fields.
For a classical field you only have light and gravity, and these propagate at c.
But if you include quantum theory fields it all gets vastly messier.
The weak force is mediated by the W and Z boson. These have mass. The strrong fo
rce is mediated by mesons, and they have mass, although the residual strong forc
e is arguably more to the point and mediated by the massless gluon.
A field is just some property you measure in 3D space. Pressure is a perfectly g
ood field. Albeit not one that measures one of the fundamental forces. It propag
ates at the speed of sound. You can have a perfectly good quantum field theory f
or sound. The sound particles are phonons, and they mediate the pressure field,
and travel at the speed of sound in the material - which need not be isotropic.
1 0
8 days ago
phil dude
Bronze badge
Thumb Up
Reply Icon
Re: speed of light...
ahh yes, got you. yes, i was thinking classically, quantum sims take too long...
..
Mea culpa
P.
9 days ago
Schultz
Silver badge
Headmaster
Holy s**t ...
this discussion is fubar. Need to get a specialist in to clean it up -- anybody
doing string theory? Gravitational physics (irrelevant here, I know)? Astrophysi
cs? Physics for dummies?
Darn, where are the boffins if you need one! Stop the nonsense forthwith, kids!
9 days ago
John F***ing Stepp
Explanation by comic
Good ol' irregular web comic
James Clerk Maxwell developed four equations that derived the speed of light.
He had to find two constants (constants in a vacuum) to do this.
Good to resolve some arguments (speed of gravity being a compression wave does n
ot care -pathetic fallacy be damned- about units of electric charge and permeabi
lity) and no other mediating particles travel at C so there.
Crap is all over empty space, random ions, solar winds, dead stars and wandering
planets: the poor little photon never stands a chance.
As an aside the wiki page has a major (and very irritating) error on it
The same error that Microsoft's Encarta had
Any one else see it?
8 days ago
John Savard
Bronze badge
It Could Be True...
If it turned out that gamma rays travel through space somewhat more slowly than
the speed of light because they sometimes turn into electron-positron pairs, the
n the speed they had when they weren't in this state, but instead going their fa
stest... would be the speed of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum, the ultima
te speed limit of the universe.
So Einstein wouldn't be wrong at all if it were discovered that real-world light
happens to travel slightly slower than the "speed of light" - especially if thi
s effect were stronger for high-energy gamma rays, and so the limit for really l
ow-energy long radio waves as they approach having no energy at all could still
be measured.
After all, when Einstein came along, it wasn't as if Newton was wrong.
So even if this is a valid discovery, it's no threat to the foundations of relat
ivity.
8 days ago
Tom 7
Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: It Could Be True...
The paper seems to rely on the idea that it took the light from the explosion 3
hours to rise to the surface of the star - it kinda bounces around in the star u
ntil it can get a free ride in space to us, the neutrinos just head on out.
The neutrinos were only detected in one detector and so there is no evidence the
y came from said star.
Even if they did come from said star the accuracy we can give to how long after
the detonation the light would be able to head on its way to us is pretty low -
there's still a lot of star to get through and there's no practical evidence for
what goes on in these things so we're still making guesses: If its a spinning s
tar are we looking at it through the pole or the equator?
8 days ago
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
Neutrinos vs Photons
What frequency were the photons?
It's possible photons of different frequencies have very very small differences
in the speed of light -- which, given the huge distance to the supernova, equate
s to 7 hours difference travel time to Earth vs. the neutrinos.
This tiny difference would not be measurable in an experiment involving measurin
g the speed of light across distances many magnitudes smaller.
eg. If the largest distance we could measure the speed of light over was from he
re to Pluto (around 0.0007 light years) we'd need to measure the distance (assum
ing our measure of time is exact) to within 4x10^(-9) metres to be sure the spee
d of light we find isn't sufficiently different from neutrino speed to lead to a
7 hour delay from the supernova 1987a (168,000 light years away).