Are neutrinos heavier or lighter than photons?

Question

anonymous · Answer

Photons, like all bosons, have no mass.  I'm not sure what the general consensus is right now, but I believe that neutrinos are thought to have very little mass.  Therefore, neutrinos are heavier or the same, but definitely not lighter.

On a side note, it was released yesterday that scientists at CERN suspect that they have found neutrinos faster traveling faster than the speed of light!  This is the kind of thing that would fundamentally change physics...  Time must be given though to see if this result stands or if it was just some type of experimental anomaly.

anonymous · Answer

yeah thats why i was asking because i heard about the finding

anonymous · Answer

60 nanoseconds faster

anonymous · Answer

Aaah, well it's really weird.  I am by no means an expert on this but I know the mass of a particle in special relativity goes like 

$$m \approx \gamma m (with a bunch of stuff)$$
and
$$\gamma = 1/\sqrt{1-v^2 / c^2}$$

So if a particle is traveling faster than light, v, then v/c above will be greater than 1.  Thus making the gamma factor imaginary, which causes the mass to be imaginary, which makes no sense.  The reason you can't go faster than light usually comes back to this gamma factor.  If v=c, then you divide by 0 and get infinities everywhere, which is why they say that it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light.  If those neutrinos were really going faster than the speed of light, then there's something odd going on.  I know very little of particle physics though.

anonymous · Answer

The guy talking about it online theorized that they might take a shortcut thru a higher dimension. I kinda excited about it all lol.

anonymous · Answer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034852

anonymous · Answer

That would be really cool, and I'd love the see the speed of light barrier broken.  But I tend to fall into the skeptic category.  It's the heart of science.  ALL other possible explanations must be conclusively discarded.  Like any possible issues in the experimental setup, measuring instruments, etc...  Then the result must be repeated over and over again.  I am hopeful for this one though.  I'll give that link a read.

anonymous · Answer

Theres audio on the link too.