Faster than the speed of light.

[GhostTX]

based on science, or based on the series?

Because the fastest I believe NC-1701D ever went was warp 9.8 due to an engine failure.


trekkie cover blown.

Series. ST:TOS warp was a slow progressive parabolic curve that could go on forever (reference graph "old scale"). Hence they did have some Warp 14-15 in that series. When ST:TNG went, they (Rodenberry and others) wanted to put a cap on the speed, so they modified the warp scale so its parabolic until Warp 9, then goes exponential taking infinite energy in order to achieve 10. In Voyager, they achieved 9.9.

[CJ]

Series. ST:TOS warp was a slow progressive parabolic curve that could go on forever (reference graph "old scale"). Hence they did have some Warp 14-15 in that series. When ST:TNG went, they (Rodenberry and others) wanted to put a cap on the speed, so they modified the warp scale so its parabolic until Warp 9, then goes exponential taking infinite energy in order to achieve 10. In Voyager, they achieved 9.9.

TNG was the best star trek.


puts on troll helmet.

[cobrajet69]

based on science, or based on the series?

Because the fastest I believe NC-1701D ever went was warp 9.8 due to an engine failure.


trekkie cover blown.

Got LS1?

Didn't think so.

Carry on...



David

[LaserSVT]

Series. ST:TOS warp was a slow progressive parabolic curve that could go on forever (reference graph "old scale"). Hence they did have some Warp 14-15 in that series. When ST:TNG went, they (Rodenberry and others) wanted to put a cap on the speed, so they modified the warp scale so its parabolic until Warp 9, then goes exponential taking infinite energy in order to achieve 10. In Voyager, they achieved 9.9.

But in the last episode in the future when Riker had NCC1701D it had a 3rd nacelle and could go warp 13.

Also Broccli....... Barkley once tapped himself into the control systems and they went to the center of the galaxy in a few seconds. Not sure what speed they went.

Then there was also the Traveler episode and they also achieved something beyond warp 10 and mentioned some new scale.

Then in Voyager they discovered Trans Warp which is also faster than Voyagers 9.9 top speed.


Man I am a nerd.

[Strychnine]

Updates:

http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/15/followup-ftl-neutrinos-explained-not-so-fast-folks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BadAstronomyBlog+%28Bad+Astronomy%29

Followup: FTL neutrinos explained? Not so fast, folks.

If you haven’t heard about the experiment that apparently showed that subatomic particles called neutrinos might move faster than light (what we in the know call FTL, to make us look cooler), then I assume this is your first time on the internet. If that’s the case, then you can read my writeup on what happened.

Basically, neutrinos move very very fast, almost at the speed of light. Some scientists created neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, and then measured how long it took them to reach a detector called OPERA, located in Italy. When they did the math, it looked like the neutrinos actually got there by traveling a hair faster than the speed of light! 60 nanoseconds faster, to be accurate.

Was relativity doomed?

Nope. In fact, relativity may very well be what saves the day here.

First, most scientists were skeptical. Even the people running the experiment were skeptical, and were basically asking everyone else for help. They figured they might have made a mistake as well, and couldn’t figure out what had happened. Relativity is an extremely well-tested theory, and doesn’t (easily) allow for FTL. Despite some headlines screaming that Einstein might be wrong, most everyone figured the problem lay elsewhere.

Most everyone zeroed in on the timing of the experiment, which has to be extremely accurate. The entire flight time of a neutrino from Switzerland to Italy is only about 2.4 milliseconds, and the measurement accuracy needs to be to only a few nanoseconds — mind you, a nanosecond is a billionth of a second!

The scientists used a very sophisticated GPS setup to determine the timing, so that has been the focus of a lot of scrutiny as well. And a new paper just posted on the Physics Preprint Archive may have the answer… and it uses relativity.


Basically, what Einstein found is that the speed of light is the same for all observers. If I’m moving at 0.9 times the speed of light toward you and turn on my flashlight, I see those photons moving away from me at the speed of light. The thing is, you see those photons moving toward you at the speed of light! This goes against common sense, which tells us that velocities add together; if I throw a baseball out car window, the velocity of the ball add to that of the car.

But light doesn’t behave that way. And this changes a lot of things, including how two objects moving relative to each other measure distance, and even how they measure time. I might measure a meter stick in my hand as being (duh) one meter long, but an observer moving past me at a significant fraction of the speed of light would see it being shorter. It’s just a consequence of the Universe making sure we all see the same speed of light.

And that’s where neutrinos come in. In this new paper, author Ronald A.J. van Elburg lays out his case. The timing was measured using a GPS satellite orbiting the Earth, and moving relative to CERN and OPERA. That means the distance traveled by the neutrinos would be less as measured by the GPS sat as it would be from the ground, and therefore wouldn’t take as long to cover it. Doing the detailed math, van Elburg calculates how much faster the neutrinos would be expected to arrive accounting for the satellite’s motion, and he gets… 64 nanoseconds. That’s almost exactly the discrepancy measured by the original experimenters.

Case closed!

Well, maybe. As I recall from the foofooraw that unfolded after the initial announcement, the original experimenters said they accounted for all relativistic effects. The paper they published, however, didn’t include the details of how they did this, so it’s not clear what they included and what they might have left out. It’s possible van Elburg might be right, but I expect we haven’t seen the end of this. After all, not long after the announcement, a physicist asked if they had accounted for gravitational time dilation — like relative velocity, gravity can also affect the flow of time, throwing off the measurement — and the experimenters said they had.

I had thought of something like this as well. CERN and OPERA are at different latitudes, and since the Earth rotates, they are moving around the Earth’s axis at different speeds. Could that be it? I did the math, and the answer is no. Too bad; it would’ve been fun to be the person to have figured this out!

The bottom line here is that this experiment is still very interesting. I don’t think we know exactly what’s going on here yet — my bet is still on the statistics, since they didn’t measure the speeds of individual neutrinos, but clouds of them, making the exact timing much harder — but it’s hard to say. Like most other scientists, I think somewhere down the line here a mistake was made, and the neutrinos, like everything else we know of made of matter, travel slower than light. But if we’re wrong, then we get new physics, which is great! And if we’re right and figure out how, it means that future experiments will benefit from this. Win/win.

Either way, my bet is that we’re not done here. This new result is interesting and may very well be right, and be the dampening field that bursts the neutrino FTL warp bubble. But I’ll wait for the reaction from the original experimenters to see what they say. If we’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s that it’s best not to jump to conclusions.

[Baba Ganoush]

How does this affect my flux capacitor?

This is all I want to know.



That, and where is my flippin' Mr. Fusion, eh?


That is all these great minds should be working on.

[Bassics]

Scientists exploring HARP laser data transfer recently wrote about increasing photon travel to the tachyon stage (light travelling faster than the speed of light, for the chrysler folks).

Some interesting notes eveolved:

"slapping a Greddy sticker on it made the laser shoot faster, and reduced turbo lag"

"I would have put an LSx in it and be done"

"Don't you neanderthals ever obey any laws?"

"we were doing that with carbs when i was just a teenager"

[cobrajet69]

Scientists exploring HARP laser data transfer recently wrote about increasing photon travel to the tachyon stage (light travelling faster than the speed of light, for the chrysler folks).

Some interesting notes eveolved:

"slapping a Greddy sticker on it made the laser shoot faster, and reduced turbo lag"

"I would have put an LSx in it and be done"

"Don't you neanderthals ever obey any laws?"

"we were doing that with carbs when i was just a teenager"

LMFAO


David

[Blackout]

futurama had it right

just what i was thinking.lmao.

[krazy kris]

my head just blew the fuck up

[Strychnine]

Update:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/basic-space/2012/02/22/faster-than-light-neutrinos-explained/?WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

Faster-than-light neutrinos explained?

By Kelly Oakes | February 22, 2012 | 4

The faster-than-light neutrinos seen by the OPERA particle physics experiment last year may have just been explained. By a loose cable. I wish I was joking.

To back up a little, the OPERA collaboration based at the Gran Sasso laboratory underneath the mountain of the same name in Italy published a paper to pre-print server arxiv.org last September saying that they had seen neutrinos, a type of sub-atomic particle, travel faster than the speed of light. They recorded neutrinos, which had travelled from CERN, Geneva, through the Earth to Gran Sasso, Italy, arriving at the laboratory 60 nanoseconds faster than they would had they travelled at the speed of light.

Since then, scientists around the world have been collectively scratching their heads and publishing papers that tended to fall into one of two categories: suggesting an error with the experiment (such as the clocks at the two laboratories not being synchronised properly), or suggesting an addition to the current theory of particle interactions that could explain the strange result (for example, a new dimension that the neutrinos could have skipped through to make their journey shorter – so they would have never actually travelled faster than light at any point).

But I don’t think anyone expected it to be something as simple as this.

Today, Science is reporting that a fibre optic cable connecting a GPS receiver and an electronic card in a computer was loose. They go on:

After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fibre, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed

This news (though still unconfirmed) rather casts a shadow over another recent explanation, involving something slightly less ridiculous.

In a paper published in journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, Claudio Germana of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova, Italy, suggests that there was a problem with the synchronisation of clocks at the two ends of the experiment. His calculations suggest that if the experiment had been run at a different time of year, the neutrinos would in fact have arrived 50 nanoseconds later than light.

I spoke to Carlo Contaldi, a physicist at Imperial College London, who last year published a paper on arxiv.org pointing out a possible problem with clock synchronisation, about the new paper. Though he thought the calculations and the large effect the calculations seemed to show were “interesting”, he had some reservations:

[Germana] does not seem to mention the latest measurements that were carried out by OPERA in November 2012. Those showed a consistent value for the neutrino’s time of flight as the previous results and it would be interesting to see how that time frame fits in with these corrections.

It’s an interesting hypothesis though – and one that is easily testable by running the experiment at a different time of year.

This paper is just the latest in a long string of attempts to explain the faster-than-light neutrinos. For more of the explanations that have been offered over the last few months, have a look at a timeline I made that follows the story right from the beginning until now.

[TEAMJACOB]

What a jip.

[03trubluGT]

WEll prot from kpax disagree's and I qoute "I would say that you misread Einstein, Dr. Powell. May I call you Mark? You see Mark, what Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster"

I found that movie very interesting and entertaining.

[Big A]

When I first read this I couldn't help but to think that there was some miniscule discrepancy in the data or measuring instruments, to come up with such a slight difference.

[yellowstang]

Fucking Time Warner!!!11!!