New Scientist 1/10/2011 p.6-7 has an article, NEUTRINOS POINT TO A NEW REALITY.

 

This article attempts to explain the new controversial discovery that neutrons of very high energy travel faster than light and so discredit Einstein's relativity theories. Thomas Weiler of Vanderbilt University in Tennesse.provides an explanation that can be summarised as follows:

Both light and neutrinos go at the ultimate speed: that of light. Light goes via ordinary three dimensional space but neutrinos do not. The latter take short cuts through the higher dimensions that describe 'branes' and follow the surfaces of these branes before jumping back into our space.

"This may be a new physics revolution", says this physicist.

For me the value of this article is the information that neutrinos from the supernova of 1987 arrived at the same time as did light but if they had gone faster, by the same amount recently reported, the neutrons would have arrived in 1982 - 5 years earlier!. However, the neutrinos emitted from CERN near Geneva to the OPERA detector in Gran Sasso, Italy 730 km apart, had energies of about 20 gigaelectronvolts - about 1000 times as energetic as those of that supernova.

This suggests a simpler and more plausible explanation:

All sub-atomic particles are made from two kinds of energy: 'rest energy' and 'kinetic energy'. The former is the energy they are made from when standing still and the latter is due to energy that needs to be added to speed them up.

From E=mc^2, which is readiliy derived from Newton's laws without reference to relativity and in which E represent energy and m represents mass, it follows that associated with these energies are 'rest mass' and 'kinetic mass'. As any particle is accelerated from rest its kinetic energy increases and therefore so does the sum of rest and kinetic energy. Acceleration becomes slower and slower due to mass increase until it becomes zero and so the particle can go no faster - even when infinite energy has been supplied. This sets the ultimate speed at which anything can travel.

This is all known physics and, with the generally accepted assumption that the particles that carry light, called 'photons', have zero rest mass, it follows that they can only travel at one speed: the ultimate speed.

However, the recent discovery is readily explained, without resort to higher dimensions, by allowing photons to have a small but finite rest energy and rest mass that increase in direct proportion to their kinetic energy. Then whatever energy they carry they will travel at the same speed that is fractionally lower that the ultimate speed.

   

 

Neutrinos also have a similar small rest mass and energy. In this case, however, like all other sub-atomic particles, their rest energy/mass' is constant. Then at low energies they travel at the same speed as light - so explaining observations of the supernova 1987 in which photons and neutrinos arrived together.

With 1,000 times as much kinetic enregy, however, neutrons would approach almost the ultimate speed and so would travel faster than light. Indeed from the data supplied, by the article just mentioned, the rest masses of photons and neutrons, together with the true ultimate speed, are readily evaluated!

Simple solutions need to be sought before resorting to those of high sophistication. What the 'anomaly' does indicate, however, it that Einstein's theories of relativity need replacement. They have needed replacement for many decades as a matter of fact, since the assumprions on which Einstein's theories are based are known to be incompatible with those of quantum theory.