Quote:
Originally Posted by the man
A particle accelerator in Europe actually detected what they believe to be partials that can travel faster than the speed of light.
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Are you talking about the neutrinos a month or so back? There was a lot of healthy speculation about that. I heard that was finally shown to be false, they got the timing between the start and endpoints wrong. They had used GPS for the timing and their error was something like they had forgot to completely take general relativity into account for calculating the time (the relative time was different because the satellites were moving fast)
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong or show a link or reference if I'm right. I can't find where I heard that.
I find the Wikipedia explanation pretty good. It should be noted what the gamma factor is (the funny y). The Wikipedia article refers to how it approaches infinity, etc., so it may be helpful to see what it actually is. It often (or almost always) pops up in the math for these types of equations, so they made a variable for it.
Oh, here's a joke. The tachyon is a hypothetical particle that would move faster than light. So...
The barkeeper says, "Hey, we don't serve tachyons here," and a tachyon walks into the bar.