HTOTM: FUSION
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just a fast question, since I am interested in the topic but don't have the time to find all the info I need.
What kind of decay did they use to make neutrinos?
can they measure the neutrino properties like spin and flavor? or do they just calculate them based on the products they can measure after the nuclear reaction?
what I am going with this is: are the neutrinos that came faster, the same ones they fired?

EDIT: ok a read a part
Originally Posted by bbc
The Cern team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, and sends them through the Earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

so do only tau show up faster or all of them?
they change in the travel? cant they transform only if they interact with something?

EDIT2: found this just now

Originally Posted by ftl
No tachyons have definitely been found and most physicists doubt their existence. There has been a claim that experiments to measure neutrino mass in tritium beta decay indicated that the neutrinos were tachyonic. ; while this is very doubtful, it is not entirely ruled out. Tachyon theories have problems because, apart from the possibility of causality violations, they destabilise the vacuum. It may be possible to get around such difficulties—but then we would not be able to use tachyons for the kind of FTL communication that we would like.

source: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...Light/FTL.html

possible explanation of the results, if the T beta decay was used to make neutrinos, or even neutrinos can spontaneously transform from one flavor to another emitting tachyons or absorbing them (if tachyons do exist ofc ).Or as they travel and lose energy they convert to tachyons (just a different form of neutrinos with formally negative mass), tachyons continue to lose energy gaining speed (if this continued they should be able to escape the experiment) but they also cause vacuum disturbances and in the cern instrument they might spontaneously convert to neutrinos and get detected (for the small amount they were tachyons the were ftl and so they came faster).

NOTE: I have no degree in physics and I studied it only on a basic level, so this is only low level speculation based on what I read on the matter in the last few days. I am just interested to see your opinions. Also I lake to make plausible theories (or at least they sound plausible to me because of my limited knowledge in the filed) about anything that interests me.

EDIT3: and this

Originally Posted by ftl
The bottom line is that you can't use tachyons to send information faster than the speed of light from one place to another. Doing so would require creating a message encoded some way in a localized tachyon field, and sending it off at superluminal speed toward the intended receiver. But as we have seen you can't have it both ways: localized tachyon disturbances are subluminal and superluminal disturbances are nonlocalquote=ftl]

source: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic.../tachyons.html
see source for the equation

so even if tachyons do exist they wouldn't allow us to send information faster than light (at least the current physics laws do not permit it). They are just like shadow

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed. ~Howard Nemerov

EDIT4: not very much related but very interesting read, about the speed of gravity. Till today I never went further on the topic than the Newtonian model in which gravity acted instantly.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...rav_speed.html

event tho they can not do it in a lab, they use cosmological observations.
Last edited by missuse; Sep 30, 2011 at 12:25 PM.
wishful eyes deceive me