Posted on 09/24/2011 6:19:59 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets
Neutrinos—ghostly subatomic particles—may have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light, scientists announced this week.
If confirmed, the astonishing claim would upend a cardinal rule of physics established by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago.
"Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So if this is true, it would rock the foundations of physics," said Stephen Parke, head of the theoretical physics department at the U.S. government-run Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
"The science is [never] settled."
I like the Einstein as Ptolemy analogy. Ptolemy was a great scientist, one of the greatest who ever lived. People who have no understanding of his achievements casually dismiss him. Will people five hundred years from now be casually dismissing Einstein?
I find it provocative that they are relying on GPS as the common timing signal. And the law of large numbers to reduce the timing errors...
I'll go out on a limb and say that it's more likely that they detect a timing bias than that they overturn Special Relativity.
The most refreshing part of the article is the scientists determination to air their results and disclose their methods, rather than act like those dorks at the CRU. Scientists are not supposed to have all the answers, they are supposed to ask the right questions and ask them honestly.
Like Obama when he smells a wallet
I remember reading about them in Scientific American in the late Sixties. As Tachyon Neutrinos lose energy, they increase their speed. Back in the Sixties it was hypothesized that, some tachyons, having collided with so many other sub-atomic particles, were going so fast, THEY WERE EVERYWHERE,,,ALLTHE TIME!
They are measuring an effect that travels faster than light, apparently. Information is not supposed to travel between two points faster than the speed of light (Quantum entanglement may or may not be an exception. You might view quantum entanglement as something like the phase velocity of light, which can travel faster than the speed of light but cannot carry information between two points faster than the speed of light.)
0bama can spend money faster than the speed of light?
I view it as Horseshit 2.0.
How can something travel faster if it’s losing energy?
Not only that, but they can anticipate how much money he wants to spend on a certain thing, too.
Naw those were just Obama's falling ratings you saw.
Be careful not to dismiss what you do not understand. Think how General Relativity must have appeared to the layman in 1919. Yet it made predictions that could be verified. In fact, the operation of the GPS constellation is dependent on General Relativity. Transistors take advantage quantum mechanics, specifically quantum mechanical tunneling.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth ....
I like John Derbyshire’s analogy of the universe of knowledge as a vast dark place, and all of our modern science shining a small circle of light around a tiny patch, bright nearest to the light (Newtonian mechanics, for instance), but very dim at the edges, and only illuminating the smallest corner.
“How can something travel faster if it’s losing energy?”
“One curious effect is that, unlike ordinary particles, the speed of a tachyon increases as its energy decreases. In particular, E is zero when v is infinity. (For ordinary bradyonic matter, E increases with increasing speed, becoming arbitrarily large as v approaches c, the speed of light). Therefore, just as baryons are forbidden to break the light-speed barrier, so too are tachyons forbidden from slowing down to below c, because infinite energy is required to reach the barrier from either above or below.”
So how does light know the speed of it’s origin without a limiting medium? This has always been my issue with a set speed of light. When my spaceship is going .5C and I turn on my headlights, how do the light particles “know” what the current speed is? Further, all speed is measured based on relative position . In a swirling universe, how exactly does one go about defining the null? Light in space doesn’t have medium constrict is like sound does on earth.
Heck, ask Scotty. He knows he can push the Enterprise to warp factor 9, but just for a bit. The dylithium crystals overheat.
Okay...
So, Einstein’s theories and the speed of light may not be “settled science”, but, global warming is settled science and unchallengeable.
(Sorry if off-topic).
Maybe he should’ve used Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
These neutrino things sound like what are shot out from some lab around Chicago and that they attempt to collect an underground lab in Ely, MN. We didn’t tour the lab but did tour the mine and there was some information, plus the guy that took us down into the mine told us about the Chicago to Ely thing while we were squashed into the car waiting for the one above (or was it below) us to load. We rode down into the mine just the way the miners did was a long ride, close to a mile(I think, it’s been awhile).
The lab itself only has tours one time during the day and we got there to late for that.
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