Neutrino Antigravity?
You’ve all probably heard the news from CERN about faster than light neutrinos. Here is a good discussion about some of the ramifications of this discovery if it pans out.
I’ve stumbled onto some other articles lately that are pointing to some weird interactions with gravity:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-dark-illusion-quantum-vacuum.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly#Possible_causes http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23198/ http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27102/?ref=rss http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100614121606.htm
Some interesting points from these are that one of the virtual particles created from the vacuum might have negative mass, and that the magnitude of the Pioneer anomaly seems to be proportional to the Hubble constant times the speed of light, and that cooper pairs in superconductors might not be affected by gravity because they are in a delocalized quantum state, and that antineutrinos oscillate at a 40% different rate than neutrinos.
I’m wondering if since neutrinos oscillate between different flavors, maybe they spend part of their time in a kind of indeterminate state unaffected by gravity and so can take a shorter path through the earth than light can, because light has to follow a curved geodesic. The straight line distance over the curved distance probably closely matches the discrepancy found by CERN.
This would make sense, because if you think of any particle or photon as having a certain amount of mass-energy equivalence that determines the path it takes near a gravity well, then if a neutrino is oscillating between different masses, it has to borrow that energy from somewhere, probably from the “vacuum” somehow. It may briefly create a negative energy virtual particle near it when it transitions from a low mass neutrino to a high mass neutrino. The negative energy virtual particle may be able to move faster than light because it would have imaginary mass. When they recombine, one would imagine that it would happen at their center of masses, which would be farther ahead in space than expected. A few oscillations over 732 km could push the neutrino ahead by several feet so it arrives early.
Another thing that might be happening is that if the neutrino is exceeding the speed of light, then it will also show an antigravity effect by following a straighter path than light, so arrive slightly higher at the detector than expected. Measuring this difference in angle might be more accurate than finding timing discrepancies. It would be as if the earth was pushing the neutrino out slightly along its path, so that new path would be travelled in the same amount of time as light would travel along its fastest possible geodesic.
Some quick tests of these possibilities might be to pass neutrinos all of the way through the earth, so that they are repelled the same amount in both directions as they pass through the core, or to pass them through longer portions of earth and see if the discrepancy is proportional to distance, or to build a detector in space and see if a straighter geodesic (due to less gravity nearby) reduces the discrepancy, or to see if a path tangent to or perpendicular to the direction of gravity affects it. Any of these results, whether positive or negative, would be revealing.
Now I fully admit that I only have an engineering background and not a physics background, but there are some fundamental concepts like mass and energy that should still work no matter what is being discussed.
Why is all of this important?
I feel like these articles are all hinting at something profound that can’t currently be explained, sort of like how Einstein’s quanta of light description of the photoelectric effect led to quantum physics.
One ramification of this is that if neutrinos have mass but don’t interact with gravity or matter because they are in a kind of indeterminate state, that might lead to a difference between gravity and inertia. Because our current understanding is that if you have a black box of some mass or energy that has the same mass-energy equivalence as something else (for example a charged battery or a dead battery plus a small additional weight to make up for the missing energy), then they will follow the same path through space near a gravity well.
But if neutrinos or cooper pairs or teleporting electrons show that mass can be converted to an indeterminate state that doesn’t interact with space, time or gravity in a normal way, then we would have a way to control gravity. That’s because we could put some kilograms of superconductor in one box and some kilograms of normal matter in another, and if we just lower their temperatures to the superconducting temperature, they would follow a different path through space, differing by the mass given up by electrons that have become cooper pairs. This will be a small effect, roughly in proportion to the number of electrons in an electric current vs avogadros number, so maybe a coulomb over a mol, or perhaps one part in 10^5. But it should still be measurable. We should see similar effects with superfluids and maybe even Bose-Einstein condensates.
From what I understand, they haven’t found a mass difference yet in superconductors, but perhaps that would change if they were moving at high speed. Perhaps frame dragging doesn’t occur for the cooper pairs. Maybe inertia would differ slightly from gravity. I don’t think those sorts of measurements have been done yet.
And for me, this fringe stuff has always excited me the most, because it might hint at new kinds of physics beyond relativity and quantum mechanics. I don’t really feel that string theory has panned out, or any purely-theoretical construct for that matter. We need some hard evidence to start from, and these sorts of experiments could provide it.
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