Posted on 10/07/2011 8:47:49 AM PDT by re_tail20
“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.
— Joke circulating on the Internet
The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.
I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.
Neutrinos fired 454 miles from a supercollider outside Geneva to an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy, took less time (60 nanoseconds less) than light to get there. Or so the physicists think. Or so they measured. Or so they have concluded after checking for every possible artifact and experimental error.
The implications of such a discovery are so mind-boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Something must have been wrong — some faulty measurement, some overlooked contaminant — to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.
And that’s the problem. It has to be impossible because, if not, if that did happen on this Orient Express hurtling between Switzerland and Italy, then everything we know about the universe is wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Painting with a pretty broad brush. Everything THEY know...
The way science used to work, the global warming guys should try this method.
Everyone knows that real scientists (like climatologists) bury the raw data, claim that their results are undeniable and set up the stake for a heretic burning for anyone who denies their claims.
A 60 nanosecond difference over 454 miles would be 0.0025% faster than the speed of light. There's lots of room for experimental error of that scale.
Nope. I know that my Redeemer liveth.
And I thought that the science was settled?
Come one people...according to the leftist godless scientists like Lawrence Krauss the universe was created from a random quantum fluctuation and it happened without a “god”. End of story./sarc
“then everything we know about the universe is wrong”
Even if faster than light travel is possible, this isn’t true. It’s hyperbole. Was everything we knew about the universe wrong when Newton was proved wrong? No. We still follow him, in the limited shpere where he applies (i.e. inbetween atoms and planets), like we’ve done since the 17th century. We’ve stuck with Einstein despite his system being overturned by quantum physics, which some people date to five years before his development of the Special Theory of Relativity.
We will stick with nearly everything we know, if this is true, except that which is directly affected by the possibility of faster than light travel.
"Two weeks ago, researchers claimed particles called neutrinos were travelling faster-than-light and violating the laws of special relativity. But now it looks as though general relativity might be behind the experiment's unusual result. An independent analysis claims that the original experiment, known as OPERA, failed to take into account differences in earth's gravitational field between the neutrino source and the OPERA detector. As Nature News reports, gravity can distort time according to Einstein's theory, and the effect could explain why neutrinos appear to arrive 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule. The OPERA team is now reviewing the new analysis."
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" - Richard Feynmen
The speed of light is inviolable. The science is settled. Deniers.
Measuring 60 nsec differences on oscilloscopes is routine.
There is pretty good theory/mathematics now that show FTL is possible.
The only limitation being that you cannot travel AT the speed of light.
How that works with the Lorentz transformations, I am not sure.
Beyond Einstein’s Unified Field:
Gravity and Electromagnetism Redefined
John Brandenburg, Ph.D.
Even when you are on the 500µs/division setting to get the entire 2.44ms travel time on the screen at once?
cosmology will be affected hugely. distances are measured/calculated assuming light speed is constant. And E=Mc^2 needs to be rethought/modified.
read my tag line.
you need a special scope, or maybe a precise delay filter.
“Man will never break the sound barrier....it’s impossible”
Bad comparison. First, whoever originally said that was an idiot. It was never impossible, it was just hard. Second, the sound barrier was only ever a technological issue, not an issue involving the fundamental character of the universe.
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