[jeff744]

Two or three is still amazing considering just a few years ago we didn't even consider it possible.

[BartSimpson]

eureka eureka:

Incredible claims need incredible evidence. The ramifications of this, if it turns out to be accurate are almost unthinkable.

The evidence is pretty scanty yet.

Talking about global warming again?

[BartSimpson]

ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:

So the speed of light is not a constant?

I've often wondered if it isn't akin to the speed of sound which varies according to conditions instead of being the absolute it was once thought to be.

In which case the speed of light is more of a variable within a range and it is also not an absolute speed...again akin to the speed of sound vis-a-vis the once so-called 'sound barrier'.

[ShepherdsDog]

so out in deep space away from large gravity wells it would move 'faster' than the space around a stellar object. Perhaps they'll come up with a theory that light travels faster as a wave rather than as a particle too, or that gravity has an effect on that as well.

[SprCForr]

I think it's incredible that they're able to synchronize within nanoseconds. Looking at the 70 yr old cuckoo clock on my wall...amazing how far we've come.

[ShepherdsDog]

The thing they have in common is that they were likely both German/Swiss made.

[DrCaleb]

ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:

So the speed of light is not a constant?

In General and Special Releativity, it is. Time, however, is not.

Relativity tells us that gravity affects time, just like speed does. Travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light, time slows down. The network of GPS sattelites orbiting the Earth at something like 30,000mph experience this, and the time lag they experience is easily measured.

There was also another experiment recently to show that gravity has the same effect. Two sensors were aimed ata a star on sattelite aimed at the same star. They both monitored gyroscopes as they passed over mountains and other features of the Earth that had varying mass and measured the effect on time experienced by the sensors. This is called 'Frame Dragging. See: http://einstein.stanford.edu/ as well.

The best way then to build a time machine, would be a ship that could orbit a black hole. The longer you orbit it, the slower time would pass.

So, from the OPERA experiment, the different depth -and proximity to the Earths core - of the two experiments may account for the 60ns time difference in the particles.