Not to be picky, but a few things are off above which rankles any sound physicist or engineer (me) who reads them. Bit like wearing a cowboy hat to an English fox hunting lodge. There is no wiggle room guys, the speed of light is fixed by Ampere's Law. In special relativity, any massless particle (force carrier) must exactly operate at this fixed limit (light speed c). Any massed particle (including neutrinos), gains in mass as it approaches light speed until no amount of infinite energy can give it the speed to reach c. Neutrinos Streaked Eagle, like everything else including massless photons must follow the geodesic curvature of space time as set out in the Ricci tensors of general relativity. There is no stutter warping.

Having said that, it is entirely possible that our current best theories are only approximations to true reality, which we do not yet fully understand. Just as Mercury's orbit confounded Newtonian physicists for 100 years, before general relativity explained it perfectly, the same may (notice I say 'may') apply here. ....

.... maybe

(*)..with Maxwell's correction.

This might get very, very interesting.

Rick, I liked your post/quote! Indeed!!
Right - not "proven," as it is an observation and data. Joins another similar observation a year or two ago at a different facility, but the measurement was within the margin of error. At this point, I would imagine a number of theorists, and experimentalists as well, will be closely examining all aspects of the measurement and the assumptions inherent. Although quite different in nature, observations of possible violations of the speed in vacuum in the past have turned out to be issues of geometry, or of spacetime expansion itself (which can and does expand at faster than the speed of light in a vacuum), etc. So the community has been through the drill over the years. As always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And in this case I believe "proof" will consist of repeated independent observations of similar nature.
But if against all the odds, this is the beginning of actual violation...wow. Just, wow. It used to be:

So I ask this as someone who has always sucked at math and the hard sciences but what would be the practical implications from this if it is proven to be fact in the near future?

If its found to be true and slightly outside the limits of error, say 1 to 2%, practically speaking in the near term as far as communications, computers, robotics, etc... not much. The implications theoretically would be huge as it would be another observation lacking a theory. Bit like how the interior of a black hole brought quantum mechanics up against general relativity and started a s#$! storm for the last 40 years or so.

The practical implication would be that information and things can travel back in time.

BTW, in Cologne, about 100 km from here, an experimental physicist also made an experiment that seemed to show faster than light travel (FTL). Also he advertised it as " *I* can't explain it any other way than FTL, but lets see what people come up with". The first idea was that what he send did not carry information. For example shine a laser at the moon and then turn the laser. The dot on the moon may travel FTL from one valley to the next, but it does not carry information from one valley to the next, so it does not contradict any theory. The experimental physicist then transferred one of Mozart's symphonies, and no one was able to doubt that this is information .

Anyway, what the theoretist found out after IIRc 3 years:
Say its about a train and you measure it going from Hamburg to Munich and the track length divided by the time is FTL. Remember we are speaking about TINY things and so not surprising, what triggered his "stop watch" is not the beginning of the train, but the centre. Also it turns out that during transit, the last few train waggons went missing. So while each carriage travelled at c, the centre of the train had "moved up" and the centre actually moved FTL.

Even if the end result was boring (no FTL travel found), I think all involved did excellent work, for example think about how unbelievably exact the measurements have to be.

Not picking on anyone specifically, but I very much dislike when non physicists (or those who are still youngling students) get in forum discussions about physics and put out theoretical posts when they dont do the math. In case one above Osram with the flashlight, there is no standard reference frame in special relativity, which means the photons emitted from the flashlight form a wavefront (wave~particle duality) and as you wave it across the moon, you can easily show with right triangle d=vt calculations that light is traveling exactly at c. Not one bit less or more. Your hand can sweep a wide angle with the flash light and emit photons from one angle to a totally different one, but by the time anyone at those two different locations has seen your light beam, you will find the speed is exactly c for both. The train example (no disrespect to you personally) sounds like some crackpot. In tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of experiments done from Michelson-Morley to today, no respected scientist has ever found a proven violation of light speed.

Negative vacuum fluctuation and quantum entanglement both operate at faster than light speed but no physical medium is moving, since the mass-energy tensor in both cases is zero. It does seem though that if someday mankind invents a hyperdrive, the most reasonable way will be quantum entanglement with strong coupling. As this occurs instantaneously (t=0).

Please read the posts before replying to them.




Yes. Did I write anything different?
The *SPOT* on the moon seems to travel FTL, but the photons themselves and thereby any information travels at c.





Funny, but that is exactly my point.
And that therefore I am sceptical about this experiment. And that there are "errors" in measurement that are VERY hard to find.

Sorry for the following section, normally I hate "name dropping", but I think after the preceding post it is necessary:

And, if we need to establish who we are:
I have a German "Diplom" (equivalent to a masters degree) in theoretical physics. My Diplomas thesis was about what effects one can expect due to quantum effects modifying the general theory of relativity and especially whether this might mean there was no big bang. So most of my calculations were about a Planck time after the big bang. I found out that even with very different assumptions, for example about Einstein's cosmological constant, there will still be a big bang. I also found out that others had found this out quite some time before me and published in some Italian physics journal. This was at the time before almost all papers can be searched for electronically.
My side subject was maths, functional analysis to be more exact. My math Prof had an Erdős number of one . The co-referent to my Diploma's theory soon afterwards became head of theoretical physics at DESY, probably the highest post for a theoretician in Germany.

Don't worry guys, feel free to make layman's approximations for the rest of us non-physicists and non-mathematicians. My background in CFD is useless here in understanding particle physics. Damned engineering degrees.