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AFP - Getty Images
The detectors of the OPERA experiment to measure neutrinos rise from the floor of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN's Gran Sasso Laboratory. Two human figures on the left and right edges of the picture provide a sense of scale.
Researchers say new tests have confirmed earlier indications that neutrinos can travel faster than light, but not everyone is convinced.
The claim runs so counter to a century's worth of physics that most observers won't be content until the findings from the OPERA experiment are repeated under a variety of conditions, by different teams of researchers. If the results hold up, that would require a reinterpretation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which effectively sets the velocity of light in a vacuum as a cosmic speed limit.
The latest round of tests was conducted to address some of the criticisms that cropped up in the wake of the OPERA team's initial announcement about faster-than-light neutrinos in September.
"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication [for] physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, or INFN, said in a news release. "The experiment OPERA, thanks to a specially adapted CERN beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although the final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."
"OPERA" is a tortured acronym that stands for "Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus." The team's researchers shoot beams of neutrinos from the CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border to INFN's Gran Sasso Laboratory, more than 450 miles (730 kilometers) away. The travel time for each pulse of neutrinos is measured to an accuracy of billionths of a second. In the faster-than-light experiment, the researchers reported that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than a light beam would have.
The revised experiment sent out 3-nanosecond-long bursts of neutrinos, spaced by as much as 524 nanoseconds, INFN said. "This permits to make a more accurate measure of their velocity, at the price of a much lower beam intensity; only 20 clean events have been collected by OPERA in this phase. Additional events could be eventually collected in the next year run," the institute said.
The Associated Press reports on the faster-than-light neutrino research.
Jacques Martino, director of France's National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at CNRS, was quoted as saying that the search for potential experimental errors "is not over."
"There are more checks of systematics currently under discussion," he said. "One of them could be a synchronization of the time reference at CERN and Gran Sasso independently from GPS, using possibly a fiber [cable]."
Some physicists criticized the initial experiment because they thought it did not fully account for the relativistic effects of the Global Positioning System, which was used to track the elapsed time as well as the distance traveled between CERN and Gran Sasso.
INFN said the updated results have been submitted for review and publication in the Journal of High Energy Physics. But ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge reported that about 15 of the experiment's nearly 200 collaborators have declined to lend their names to the journal submission, on the grounds that further confirmation is required.
An unnamed source on the OPERA team told ScienceInsider that the controversy over the faster-than-light findings was exhausting. "Everyone should be convinced that the result is real, and they are not," the source was quoted as saying.
Other researchers, including physicists with the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, are working up independent analyses of neutrino runs to assess the OPERA team's findings. The initial outside assessments are expected to become available within six months or so, but end-to-end replications of the experiment could take significantly longer.
Update for 2 p.m. ET Nov. 18: In response to some of the comments below, I've changed the headline on this item, which originally read "Faster-than-light neutrinos confirmed." I realize the new headline still implies that superluminal neutrinos actually exist even though the evidence for that is in dispute, but I hope you'll understand that this is shorthand for "New experiment continues to support hypothesis about faster-than-light neutrino travel."
More on the faster-than-light controversy:
- Neutrinos spark wild scientific leaps
- Faster-than-light neutrinos? Not so fast, some say
- Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
- Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
- 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Leave a Comment:
There be some going into bars and then arriving now dawg.
wow... profound stuff
Does this mean I can go back and re-do my high school years?
Ok, I have read the various responses, the attempts at humor through pseudo-ebonics and the political blather but so far no one has addressed the most important issue as I see it.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the findings are verified, that they have discovered neutrinos that can travel faster than the speed of light.
Ok, what does this mean to me and my friend Joe Six-pack? I want common sense, real world answers here folks. Not blather, not science mumbo-jumbo, I want plain language responses. The restructuring of physics as you know it does not help. Physics is something that the kids with the pocket protectors and the great big giant brains understand. Not poor little monkey/lizard brain me!
Does it open the door for FTL space travel? I would assume that's the big deal. Maybe in a hundred years we will have our first "warp drive" and we'll be right on schedule for first contact with the Vulcans and narrowly dodge the Borg bullet?
What does this mean to the average human being?
Again, for the sake of argument let's assume the findings are accurate and upheld by further, rigorous testing.
What does it mean to humanity?
If the findings are accurate, it means that one of our biggest physical theories--relativity--needs some tinkering. Will that lead to any devices, gizmos, or inventions? I don't know.
But not all of science is about making a better frying pan coating. A large part of science is understanding how our universe works. And this result, if accurate, will tell us something new about the universe.
Except what most people fail to realize is by increasing our understanding of the world it leads to better gizmos for the rest of us. Nobody knows what this may lead to in the future, but whatever it is we are incapable of imagining it now.
The only way that this 'result' should ever be reported or accepted in a peer-reviewed journal is if a simultaneous control experiment is run. That is, the neutrinos must actually race photons and win. This would not confirm as fact that neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light, but it would at least provide a control for the experimental conditions allowing for the possibility to be reported. Differing relativistic effects between the neutrinos and photons themselves, including varying effects of gravity and modes of propagation in finite space, would still need to be considered, but at least the experiment itself would have validity. It shouldn't be that hard to do (comparatively) and there's no risk of getting scooped... do it right before you declare major changes to basic principles of known science.
You some angry fool dawg.
Guilty as charged :) But I run my controls.
Or....just take a deep breath. Ah. That felt good.
There's no way to send photons through the same path the neutrinos follow. The only reason the neutrinos can make it through the Earth over several hundred km is that their interaction cross-section is so small. That is, there's such a low probability of the neutrino interacting with matter in the Earth, that essentially all the neutrinos from the beam arrive at the detector. Photons, on the other hand, would not get very far before being scattered out of the beam.
@AstroPhys1
Ever heard of something called a tightly contolled LASER beam?? It can goo from to earth and moon and back again without scattering.
apples and oranges, unstable wanderer. apples and oranges.
Well, now that I've slept and am better rested... sorry for the apparently angry tone of my original post :) I still want to see a race. The propagation of errors between release time, detection time, the clocks themselves, GPS positioning, 'actual' path, and many other factors we may not even know about become pretty substantial when accounting for nanoseconds. Unless I'm greatly behind on the accuracy (not precision which appears to not be the issue...) of much of the technology used in these measurements (certainly possible but you'd have to convince me with actual error analysis) there simply needs to be a control with light in order to cancel out much of the propagating uncertainty. Plus, it would just be plain more convincing. It's not easy, but it is certainly possible for an exactly juxtaposed experiment. Great experimental scientists must accept the burden of proof, and plan their course accordingly.
I'm not sure how a race between photons and neutrinos could be accomplished, though if feasible would provide an excellent control. Unless some 730 km tunnel is drilled straight as an arrow between the detector and beam source, I don't know how to accomplish this. Perhaps a detector could be flown into orbit? My guess is the detector is way too big for that and it would take decades to assemble. Anyone got a spare $10 trillion?
For now I guess we have to rely on error analyses and calibrations of the components to get the best accuracy for confirmation. Maybe in 50 years an experiment in space will finalize the answer to this with a direct race between photons and neutrinos.
Ok, I have read the various responses, the attempts at humor through pseudo-ebonics and the political blather but so far no one has addressed the most important issue as I see it.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the findings are verified, that they have discovered neutrinos that can travel faster than the speed of light. Ok, what does this mean to me and my friend Joe Six-pack? I want common sense, real world answers here folks. Not blather, not science mumbo-jumbo, I want plain language responses. The restructuring of physics as you know it does not help. Physics is something that the kids with the pocket protectors and the great big giant brains understand. Not poor little monkey/lizard brain me!
Does it open the door for FTL space travel? I would assume that's the big deal. Maybe in a hundred years we will have our first "warp drive" and we'll be right on schedule for first contact with the Vulcans and narrowly dodge the Borg bullet?
What does this mean to the average human being? Again, for the sake of argument let's assume the findings are accurate and upheld by further, rigorous testing. What does it mean to humanity?
@Joe,
The problem is that neutrinos are detected with deep underground detectors which eliminate other forms of radiation. Soon as you come up with way to shoot photons through solid granite, then you're on. But the major flaw in your argument is that in theoretical physics, it is called that because you are measuring not A against B, but A and B against C. The speed of light has always previously been a gold standard to compare with. Comparing the speeds of actual photons and neutrinos is pretty much meaningless.
It is very frequent for scientists to publish such results in peer-reviewed journals as a call for replication. They did their experiments and duplicated them over and over before publishing their results as an official request for replication of the observations. And the first result of the publication was alarming --- FermiLab had actually had the same results in the past and had just chunked out the experiments as somehow flawed and unreliable without determining what the problem was. Of the original 200 researchers involved, about 100 did not put their name on the original paper because they felt that something important (though they did not know what) was being overlooked. Then they completely redesigned the experiments again and ran them again and got the same results. Now only 17 out of about 200 authors did not want their name on the actual paper.
No one is talking about changing any basic science. Science is observation-based and what you see is what you see. What they are doing is employing huge amounts of rigor, since the proposed observation has huge impact, and trying to get as many people as possible to replicate the observations independently. That is going on in a number of places right now.
The odds are still extremely high that the experiments are flawed, but it is nonetheless important. Even if something proves to have been omitted, measured inaccurately, or overlooked, it represents a pitfall that can be avoided by future researchers.
Can someone explain exactly how this is done? If neutrinos basically do not interact with normal matter and can pass directly through solid granite, as mentioned above, how is the "beam" generated, controlled, transmitted and detected at the receiving end?
I always wonder about guys like JoeThesciencePro. Why are they such douchebags. There is a reason you are “Joethesciencepro” and others work at CERN.
I guess you are just frustrated, right?
Joe, if the speed of light is a known constant then you don't need to have an actual race. If the neutrinos are faster than the known constant then you have your proof.
Mikey-Mike,
I believe it's done with super strong magnetic fields.
Thanks for the reply F.F.,
I'm still mystified. Neutrinos don't interact with solid matter, passing right through the subatomic interstices, but they are affected by magnetic fields. Don't many atoms, particularly iron if I'm not mistaken, have magnetic polarities? I don't get how this is possible.
I guess I'll spend my Thanksgiving vacation reading up on neutrinos, quantum theory and the speed of light in Wikipedia.
@MikeyMike - apparently, the OPERA detector uses 'bricks' built of interleaved layers of lead and photographic emulsion film. Neutrinos are weakly interacting, and will normally pass through matter without colliding.
However, the occasional muon neutrino will slam into an atom, and in this case when the muon hits a lead atom a tau lepton (tauon) and its associated tau neutrino will be spun off as a result of the collision. The tau neutrino is difficult to measure, but the tauon is easily measured with pretty much a standard scintillation counter. The film is used to calculate the track and determine what kind of particle was responsible for the hit on the scintillation counter.
Umm... the speed of light as a constant and a limit is the *assumption* of Einstein's theory, not the conclusion.
Similarly, Newton's assumption of gravitation as an instantaneous force has been show to be false (at least by the precession of Mercury) but we can still use the theory to build bridges and skyscrapers. Theories are useful for engineering new things. If there is something new, we can always build a better theory...
Joe, I never took your post as angry. On the contrary, I find the idea of such a test quite brilliant. I am not sure how such a test could be conducted, but if it were so done and the nutrinos arrive first, then that would be something for the front page (in my geek mind, at least). I rather think the whole absolute speed of light is a fundamental misunderstanding of relativity which ties together relative motion, mass and energy so that space and time are woven into relative velocity structure like some 4 dimensional toroid .... a move in one part is reflected in the others and the result is always a balance between them. But then I am no physicist!
skip Nicholson, Oklahoma City: This is a mostly theoretical discussion and knowing that neutrons could travel faster than light won't translate to anything practical right away.
In the short term, it may affect our perception of time and space and the very essence of our understanding of the universe. That's a big deal. In the long term, it could become the very underpinning to important technologies.
Brian Greene said some 30% of our current GDP is based on advances found in quantum physics.
Einstein's theory is confirmed. It is now: E=mv2
By the way, the "v" is actually the Greek letter "mu" which is the scientific notation for the neutrino.
no, no, no. you have it all wrong. emu squared = ostrich. seriously. when will this debate end?
.. and never forget pi r round! Cornbread r square!
Actually- e = mc^x(dimensional manifold)2
This taKes into account the inertial frame by which the energy takes place AND the dimensional perspective of the observer.
X is usually less than one. 3d is one, higher energy becomes common place with "action" points or information trees, so the lower energy for action as 1 decreases, until e=mc and it becomes a constant as mass ceases to exist as all object have the same mass so m becomes 1, then you just have e=c.
Which basically shows that energy then equals action, or information. So the concious observer controls all things in the manifold by merging with it and the energy required for any action is basically zero.
But I could be wrong it's just something I thought about in the cafeteria this morning.
Sorry, I forgot, c goes to zero as x goes to zero, so eventually the m times c goes to zero, and that basically shows how energy disappears as any action is equally manifesting from that perspective with no energy requirement, all things being in a very complex static geometry where causality (space time) becomes meaningless (as energy). I wrote it on a napkin somewhere.
X is 1 in 3d, and as dimensions increase it decreases logarithmically.
Basically as you go to higher dimensions, you are more information based so it takes less energy for any action-meaning thought alone yields action, taking very little Energy, which is a constraint of linear time. (as you get more entropic, you can simulate more, like in a black hole -most entropic and simultaneously most complex and imformation intense-so as energy increases, it is more chaotic, but as you simulate higher and higher functions on RHE chaos, each perspective or higher dimension sees the energy it is being simulated on as less and less relevant-because it is less "bound" by the constraints of the system that gave rise to it..,hence, since it is simulating on something more "chaotic" as it looks down and sees the energy of a more "defined" limited and bounded system, it just sees energy as a requirement that comes from causality and linear time, because it's "less bounded"system is not limited by such requirements, it can "skip" the thing that makes energy relevant in the first place-time)
You can to google and put in "the ultimate laptop- a black hole"
To see what I'm talking about.
You were doing fine until the "x is usually less than 1" clip. That, I think, is where your theory hit the whirlpool.
Actually. I didnt use the actual equation because that's you're responsibility, I'm simply a messeger.
X obviously is greater than 1 most of the time. Duh.
Btw, if higher dimensions outnumber 3d, as a totality of existence, it would follow that x (under the above logic) would be less than 1 most of the time. But you're point is well taken.
And that is how an Oslo Dentist by the name of Svenge came to own an interstellar toothbrush, which he in turn loaned to his sister-in-law who got bitten by a moose as she attempted to carve her initials in the moose with the toothbrush.
Dawg, you know I be telling it how it is. You be jealous of my mad skills fo a reason
I would Say it is more like e=mc^2 Minus 1% to account for Entropy. " c" here is the assumed constant not the Mythical " Speed of Light "
@Looooood,
Now tell me again why I should consider the theorizing of someone who does not know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're." Imprecise minds think imprecise thoughts. Not exactly what high energy particle physics demands.
I am not a grammar maven or a spelling queen by any means. But it is a matter of whether or not a person's expression of an idea is accurate and concise. ROFL
chris, am I to understand that you actually beleive the bllsht I posted above and the pseudo ebonics that came with it? Do you know the satire?
Am I somehow claiming to know the answer? Thats your own perspective dawg. Take from it what you will and move on because I don't claim to know sht sir.
But I am flattered that you consider my haphazard thoughts in boredom worthy of scientific deliberation-
ROFL ROFL LMAO LOLCATZ
I found a flaw!
That should be OPETA, not OPERA!
I win!
I'm pretty sure someone else wins.
I don't know who this someone else is though....this is really confusing for me.
more philosophy than physics, but that's fine with me. It's all just 'monkeys trying to put two sticks together to reach the banana' no matter how you write it; just race 'em.
It's like them ghosts, you be playing nintendo, and they be opening a drawer.....take out a knife, but they be scared because they don't know why youre not scared,
So they hide because they don't know what's goin on and you be chill in playin nintendo.
exactly. I couldn't have said it better myself.
I had erroneously thought that the real philosophers had belonged to another time. I now know better! Thanks, you guys! I am off to the basement to race bosons! May the best formed boson win!
... or did I mean bosoms? .... I am always getting those confused .... drat!
Einstein's theory that large gravity bends light has been proven, ergo, gravity has an effect on photons -- even lesser gravity. It stands to reason that the neutrino, having less mass than a photon would be less affected by gravity. The speed of light -- regardless of its universal acceptance -- is still a theory to be proven in a gravity-free environment beyond the solar system and even beyond the galaxy, if such a place exists. Einstein's theory should not be invalidated by the discovery that the universe is capable of even greater surprises than those now surmised. It simply means that more decimal places must be put in the equation.
A neutrino does not have less mass than a photon. In fact, it has substantially more (which could be any amount) since a photon has none.
That said, when I saw the first few paragraphs of this article, I slapped my forehead in utter amazement and sat there like a slack-jawed caveman for about 3 minutes. If this is true... ummm... WOW.
According to Dave Goldberg it's not known if photons have mass or not...
http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2181
I think you missed the point of that article. The point is that we can't measure zero exactly (just as we can't measure any other figure exactly). His point is that the maximum possible mass of a photon is vanishingly small and force-carrying particles that are massive (i.e., that have mass) limit the range of the force involved. In essence, his point is that a photon must be massless.
It is my understanding that E=MC2 is valid with a photon because a photon has potential mass.
@Tetom,
It's kinda like what happened when Newton published his laws of motion. Almost a third of the Royal Academy pointed out that his laws were NOT laws since they could, by their nature, never be observed or tested. In other words, the laws of motion were two-body solutions for which there were absolutely no two-body problems. The laws of motion would have been more properly called the rules-of-thumb of motion. But Newton did what any self-respecting scientist would do at the time. As President of the Royal Academy, he removed all dissenters from the rolls.
Much of the theory of relativity is so theoretical that it cannot be measured directly, and much of the rest is subject to Heisenberg. Einstein was adamant about the parts that were not measurable and that they should be taken as theoretical abstracts only. For example, it may turn out that the speed of light has a compounding element that essentially turns it into a range of values or a conditional value. Not a big deal. The more we learn the more we find that we do not know.
Buddha-Dude: You gotta lay off the buddha, dude. E=mc^2 is valid with a photon because the equation is an expression of equivalence between matter and energy. A photon with at least 0.511 MeV colliding with another photon of at least 0.511 MeV can produce an electron and a positron (e- and e+) with kinetic energies determined by what's left over after subtracting 1.022 MeV from the total energy involved.
The application of E=mc^2 has nothing to do with photons potentially having mass. It's an expression of how much mass can be created from their energy.
I'm still going to want some proof that these neutrinos have mass before I go ripping down my Einstein posters.
Stop. ok this might help. have you heard or read about using Neutrinos to collide with an atoms core, and what the by products are?
@The Big Lebowski Legacy
Then I may have misunderstood what I read from multiple sources, for example:
http://www.einsteinsmethod.com/Potential_Mass.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon#Experimental_checks_on_photon_mass
http://www.greatians.com/physics/wave/energy%20of%20photon.htm
http://optica.machorro.net/Lecturas/PhotonMass_rpp5_1_RO2.pdf
http://www.europhysicsnews.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=272&Itemid=&lang=en_GB.utf8%2C+en_GB.UT
The correctness of Einstein's 1905 derivation of E=mc2 was criticized by Max Planck (1907), and also by Herbert Ives (1952), and also in a recent book (2008) by Hans Ohanian.
Einstein considered a body at rest with mass M. If the body is examined in a frame moving with nonrelativistic velocity v, it is no longer at rest and in the moving frame it has momentum P = Mv.
Einstein supposed the body emits two pulses of light to the left and to the right, each carrying an equal amount of energy E/2. In its rest frame, the object remains at rest after the emission since the two beams are equal in strength and carry opposite momentum.
But if the same process is considered in a frame moving with velocity v to the left, the pulse moving to the left will be redshifted while the pulse moving to the right will be blue shifted. The blue light carries more momentum than the red light, so that the momentum of the light in the moving frame is not balanced: the light is carrying some net momentum to the right.
The object has not changed its velocity before or after the emission. Yet in this frame it has lost some right-momentum to the light. The only way it could have lost momentum is by losing mass. This also solves Poincaré's radiation paradox, discussed above.
The velocity is small, so the right-moving light is blueshifted by an amount equal to the nonrelativistic Doppler shift factor 1 − v/c. The momentum of the light is its energy divided by c, and it is increased by a factor of v/c. So the right-moving light is carrying an extra momentum ΔP given by:
The left-moving light carries a little less momentum, by the same amount ΔP. So the total right-momentum in the light is twice ΔP. This is the right-momentum that the object lost.
The momentum of the object in the moving frame after the emission is reduced by this amount:
So the change in the object's mass is equal to the total energy lost divided by c2. Since any emission of energy can be carried out by a two step process, where first the energy is emitted as light and then the light is converted to some other form of energy, any emission of energy is accompanied by a loss of mass. Similarly, by considering absorption, a gain in energy is accompanied by a gain in mass. Einstein concludes that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.
Oops equations didn't show up.
You can find the derivation in layman language at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence#First_correct_derivation_.281905.29
These people are smart. They are running experiments, analyzing results, and accepting criticism in order to find the facts. The Global Warming Alarmists, on the other hand, are using models that have been proven wrong and they tell lies to the public. Hopefully, no Democrat becomes a scientist. Ohm's law could be invalidated!
Obama is soooooo going to win again! :)
hmmm, I certainly can't argue with that! But I will say that Ohm's law would be invalidated by default if these people are correct in their claims, so I guess it's safe for young Democrats to study science. Dodged a bullet there.
Actually Mr. Chicago...the majority of the scientific community agree that global warming is taking place. Regardless of some flawed models, a combination of ice core data measurements of deuterium/regular H2O concentrations, as well as the presence of such organisms as foraminifera and other protist fossils with recent atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration measurements basicly proves that human beings have added copious amounts of CO2, CH4, NO3, CFC's, HFC's, etcetera to the atmosphere (as well as land and oceans in other forms) since the industrial revolution. We know for a fact that this planet has a greenhouse effect...otherwise millions of years ago when the suns radiative forcing was less than it is today, it would have been cooler than it is now...not hotter. All the hype you hear in the news about flawed reports of global warming is based on three things: 1.) Media corporations owned by large conglomerates who have a profitable interest in continuing the burning of fossil fuels, 2.) the difficulty in producing a "model" which comprehensively and acurrately predicts climate change given such intricacies in this world as minute wind changes, currents, particulate matter in the atm, feedbacks, sequestration, sea water densities, deep-water circulation, anthropogenic inputs, radiative forcing, albedo, tidal influence, thermal sea water expansion, eustatic sea level rise, adiabatic temperature changes, etc etc etc, and 3) the skepticism of people like you...this is on what the energy companies, chemical companies, and right wingers prey.
Everyone seems to need a model of this extremely intricate process to "prove" and obvious phenomenon is taking place...when the simple proof is...
Greenhouse gas increases global atmospheric temperature (and therefore oceanic temperature) + fossil fuels/deforestation add extreme amounts of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere (those extracted millions of years ago in the case of fossil fuels) + humans are burning fossil fuels and removing forested lands = Humans are causing global atmospheric temperature to rise. Simple right?
Regardless of the natural heating and cooling of the earth brought by Milankovich cycles (look it up), humans are still changing our climate at a pace faster than what is natural. The Earth will survive...your grandchildren? Probably not.
Geeze. Read a book, please! To be believe that climate change science is all just a big hoax is to believe that there exists a *world-wide* conspiracy, by thousands of scientists, to... uhm, do WHAT again, exactly? And WHY? What's their huge agenda supposed to be?
And I'm not playing some rhetorical "debating game" by asking this question, either; I genuinely do not know what the goal of such a vast Climate Scientist-led conspiracy is thought to be. (??) (Or have the AGW-deniers not reached a consensus on this question?)
Also forgot to mention that very few incidents of flawed or biased data have been reported dealing with climate change. The IPCC is so widespread and "inter-governmental" specifically to achieve repeated measurements and scenarios amongst a multitude of scientists. The problem is that the very few botched cases are usually the only ones reported...especially on faux news, they'll take anything they can get.
Alex, glad someone took the bait :) I find myself lacking the strength these days. What 98% of the scientific community accepts as fact will always be irrelevant in the face of public opinion, and so I say the greatest challenge facing society today is the war of public persuasion, for which scientists are generally poorly equipped. Then followed by energy, water, food, etc. :) Keep fighting the good fight, and I suggest to use climate change rather than saying global warming; it's a more accurate term related to effect, and it is harder to blindly argue with.
Invalidating Ohm's Law will be met with resistance.
But resistance is futile!!!!
This should not be the least bit surprising, given that the evidence data gathered in the last ten to twenty years continues to make nonsense of the Darwinian theory of evolution, an increasingly implausible scenario for which no evidence truly remains supportive in the face its many serious problems and the increasingly vast body of evidence refuting it; moreover, this is the case for the macro-evolutionary scenario even before one begins to consider the wholly implausible (to the point of impossibility) scenario of any naturalistic biochemical origin for Darwin's mythological process; and MORE moreover, even THIS doesn't begin to go into the increasing body of evidence strenuously implying not only that the universe is so precisely fine-tuned to be a habitat for life, but also that this only known planetary home to observers within it to be, of all places conceivable in the universe, supremely advantageous for making observations about the universe, adding up to a cumulative weight of evidence supporting only one rational conclusion: the only rational inferential argument to be derived from the cumulative weight of this scientific evidence supports, and is only supportive of, personal willful intelligent design as the only rational explanation for the universe and of life in it. Yet one never reads of the vast number of respected credentialed scientists who have accepted design as the only credible explanation for the properties of this universe itself--not to mention life in this universe--nor hears any mention in the press of the vast body of available scientific data which supports this conclusion. Any one of literally hundreds of details about the actual physical conditions relevant to our existence on this planet is altogether sufficient to make the case for design, yet there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of these details! The best the atheistic gang can do is speculate about a mythological multitude of universes in a vain attempt to pry the lid off of naturalism's coffin, that anything which begins has a cause and since this universe clearly had a beginning, the only uncaused spontaneous causation we know of--and we know of it personally and intimately as an everyday commonplace experience--is the causality of free will. Thus the universe must have been caused to begin by a free will. Yet you will grow old waiting for the popular information tyrants to acknowledge the now well-established fact that Darwinism is a dead theory and design the only rational explanation for the existence of this universe and the life in it.
Just one small example, and then the willfully blind to the evidence atheist vultures can proceed with their mock-fest of sneering falsehoods.
The moon is 1/400 the size of the sun, but it is also 1/400 the distance of the sun from the earth, making it the same size, and therefore the only way we could have verified Einstein's theory about bending of light as we did, and the only way we could have seen the sun's corona--both points bearing on the suitability of the universe and our location in it to observation.
And it is theorized that Earth's moon, which has no parallel in the inner solar system came about by a near-collision event that is likely very rare in the universe, yet the moon stabilizes the Earth's axis (keeping the history of life from having been frozen or fried long ago) as well as moving the tides enough to circulate the nutrients in the oceans yet not so much as to do violence to the coasts. Move the moon fractionally closer or farther away, or make if fractionally bigger or smaller, and none of this holds. Only one size for the moon, and distance from Earth relative to distance of Earth from Sun, makes all of these things possible. To believe that there is another moon in the universe with these properties orbiting a water planet that is nevertheless not 100 percent covered with water in a nearly circular orbit around its parent star is to believe in the tooth fairy.
Hermeticists had it right all along. You can transmute stuff, etc. They be some dark sorcerers keeping mankind down at the moment I sense.
Ummmm, no, no he's not - at this stage, Bozo the Clown could beat him.....but keep smoking that crack pipe........
depends on your frame of reference; mankind is a heavy burden to some pretty great dark sorcerers.
How so, they need humanity to survive. They be needing the psychic energy for space time grids. If we didn't exist, they would be self contradicting as their information platform is self supressing (their beingness). Our design as was intended (Jesus christ conciousness) is self justifying. Their being needs us, we do not need them. They are not very unlike the ai in the matrix.
I guess in a way you are right though-they need to be constantly putting mankind back in the pen with disasters to make sure they can exist...as such, humanity is a burden.
does this mean now, that the Universe might not be 14.5 billion years old, since "faster then light" at the start was possible? that would change a lot of thing. This might be the greatest discovery yet.
It's probably a time warp of some kind.
Consider that space traveled faster than light at the extremities of the 3 sphere at the big bang, which means from perspectives within things have appeared to travel faster and hence to the past. We may be observing a combination of things,
This awful headline is the reason people think science seldom gets it right - the MEDIA is claiming "confirmation," not the scientists!
My first research paper in Chemistry took two entire years of research and, when published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, began: "One POSSIBLE mechanism for the Dienol-Benzene Rearrangement..." If the press had found that study newsworthy the headline would surely have been "Rearrangement Mechanism Discovered!"
The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, pp. 27-28, says: "The problem is that the...news venues often turn the baby steps of scientific research into "major advances," breakthroughs," and "possible cures" or highlight the confusing contradictions.
...Unfortunately, these...never carry warning labels like "Educated Guess: Subject to Change," and after being repeated thousands of times they acquire a ring of truth.
...For...research, the rhythm is more like a cha-cha -two steps forward and one step back- than a straight-ahead march...researchers can't get it right the first time...because these conflicts and contradictions are the way science works. It happens this way in every field, from archeology to zoology, nuclear physics to nutrition. Men and women carry out their studies and report their results. Evidence accumulates. Like dropping stones onto an old-fashioned scale, the weight of evidence gradually tips the balance in favor of one idea over another. It is only when this happens that you should make changes in your life [nutrition is this quote's topic]."
Nice post Mick, from a fellow chemist :) I totally agree, but don't be so quick to let your scientific colleagues of the hook, it's all too easy on the really big stuff to let your excitement get the best of you. Think pulsars that defy the same principles at the root of this article (actually something messing with the radio dish of the roof) and then there's good old cold fusion... 'Confirmed' wouldn't be in the title unless someone said it... that's my guess.
Actually, Joe, the media often gets confused on what the definition of "confirmed" is. Over the last 10 years I've read headlines confirming proof of alien life, ghosts, a cure for AIDS, and anti-gravity. Then the scientists that they misquoted have had to deal with the fallout from the scientific community accusing them of bad science. I would say there is way more bad journalism than bad professional science. Everyone knows hype sells. That's why most major newspapers and magazines are becoming more and more like tabloids.
Yes, I agree and am not arguing that fact. I have been 'mis-quoted' myself several times. But I do take responsibility for my words, which on reflection often could have been a little clearer, especially if I had known ahead of time how they would be contextualized. Oh, and hype sells for scientists too... science is expensive, and the nice folks who control a lot of it don't know the science that well, and they don't just give money away ;) The allure of stretching extrapolation using layman's terms can be very strong...
Was just coming here to see if anyone else found that irritating. Glad I'm not alone :-)
The investigators have "confirmed their measurements" in a new experiment in which the neutrino bursts are much shorter. This eliminates a lot of the statistical arguments used in the original paper. The results now have smaller error bars.
They have removed a possible source of error and thus "confirmed" the original finding which is that neutrinos seem to be moving slightly in excess of the speed of light.
The authors themselves do not conclude that they are indeed moving faster than light, but that in their careful analysis they have not been able to discover a systematic error to explain the result.
So "confirmed" as used in the article title may be a little misleading but it is not entirely wrong.
I'm glad to consider putting another verb in there ... Will give it another try. However, I should point out that the press release from INFN is this: "New Tests Confirm the Results of Opera on the Neutrino Velocity, But It Is Not Yet the Final Confirmation"
http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1031226
For what it's worth, I've changed the headline.
I am thinking that while this may not actualy reveal faster than light neutrinos, it might reveal something profound. I think something unaccounted for is at work here. And let us please remember, Einstein didn't get everything absolutly right. He was just more right than his peers.
There is a possibility, slim I will admit, but perhaps testing is needed to track the speed of light. It is POSSIBLE that the absolute speed of light in a vacuum is NOT a constant, and since we, apparently, have found something that exceeds the speed of light by a tiny amount, perhaps it is actually the speed of light that has changed and thus the measurements that we get for the neutrinos, even tho they are faster than the recorded speed of light, do not actually surpass it if the speed of light has actually increased. It would be easy enough to test for, after all, the speed of light was determined back in the 1800's with what we would consider crude instrumentation, so it should be easy enough now to retest and check!
One simple explaination might be that the speed of light in a vacuum is actually equal to the speed of the neutrino shown in the experiment. Light itself might be slowed down by some sort of arcane "stuff" (the ether?) permiating the universe - when discussing relatively unknown things like dark matter, dark energy, string theory, and multiple dimensions, I think the idea of something filling space becomes at least possible.
Einstein never said it was impossible to travel faster then light.
Other people made that incorrect assumption and it has been blindly followed, until now.
I'm so glad there are people who understand this stuff. I wish I could. And I wish you could explain it to me in a way I could understand. But it's OK. I'll just have to live with it. ;)
I am with you 100% on this one! I've just been reading all of this and it's like they're speaking in a different language! I'm not knocking it though, I'm quite envious. I would have loved to have been posh! Ah well, s'pose it's my own fault for quitting school early and not taking my GSCE's ha!
To Polygamy,
If your truely interested I would suggested mkaku.org, the website of one Michio Kaku. He has a way of explaning theoretical physics that is most agreeable and easy to follow for just about anyone.
Let me help, if I may.
NO! They did not measure anything traveling faster than light, especially neutrino's! Italian authorities should seriously consider doing a criminal investigation to see what is the real motivation for this kind of drivel. Either some folks got themselves hooked on some strong heroin coming out of Afghanistan, or there is some other funny business going on with grant funding or some other financial angle. Seriously. Right now there is another Italian "scientist", goes by the name of Andrea Rossi, from the University of Baloney who has been claiming to have demonstrated a working cold fusion machine which produces more electricity than it uses. She calls it the E-Cat. I call it the Bulls-hit. Maybe these two are related somehow. The sad part is that these stories get picked up by mainstream news media outlets, and instead of realizing the nonsense, they print it! And the story gets relayed around the world 7 times in one second, as if it's a fact, when the only fact is that these "science" reporters do not have a clue about that which they are writing.
F.Y.I. - Andrea Rossi, the inventor to whom you refer, is male.
I believe it gets reported around the world faster than the speed of a neutrino.
Bob, your accusations are beyond bad. You clearly have no idea what's going on here. These scientists are not a bunch of idiots or con men. There may well be some mistake in this measurement and they know that. They just cannot figure out what it is. Painting them with E-Cat type hype is just insulting and you should be ashamed.
Take you anti-scientist crap to faux news.
Yeah right, 'cause the Italian government gave billions of dollars to a bunch of dope addicts and they used it to build a really cool science experiment.
We are but in our infancy in figuring out the workings of the universe. Only a fool or total narcissist would be so arrogant to think that what theories we have now are absolute and unchanging forever. Newton's "laws" held up for a while but as knowledge expanded they were superceeded by greater knowledge. It didn't make Newton's work innaccurate just incomplete and limited to work within certain criteria. As our knowledge continues to expand we will continue to adjust our theories.
True scientists release results or even calculations they feel are either accurate or can't explain so other scientists can share in and expand the knowledge. Unfortunately, people (often the media) try and take these things as new laws. A good scientist (on either side) welcomes this knowledge without insults and adds to help prove or disprove. These scientists appear to be humbly putting out what they learned and aren't claiming anything. Now others can prove or disprove them and we move ahead. It would however be foolish for any sicentist to suggest that our current theories on anything are absolute and that these people MUST be wrong and charlatans because they reportedly found something otherwise.
REMEMBER the scientist who prove heavier than air flight was impossible two months before the Wright brothers first powered flight. This may mean another case of a rock solid theory bits the dust. It would not be the first time.
Mike, that was exceedingly well stated and essentially sums up the true spirit of real science. There will never be a final destination as long as we are human ... only the journey.
Maybe the energy-time uncertainty principle can explain the discrepancy?
Other than the position-momentum uncertainty relation, the most important uncertainty relation is that between energy and time. The energy-time uncertainty relation is not, however, an obvious consequence of the general Robertson–Schrödinger relation. Since energy bears the same relation to time as momentum does to space in special relativity, it was clear to many early founders, Niels Bohr among them, that the following relation should hold:
dE dT >= h
but it was not always obvious what Δt precisely meant. The problem is that the time at which the particle has a given state is not an operator belonging to the particle, it is a parameter describing the evolution of the system.
They should check their experiment against the more widely used formulation of the time-energy uncertainty principle as given in 1945 by L. I. Mandelshtam and I. E. Tamm.
I think it has to do with spin.
Would that be particle spin or media spin. :P
To Bob;
Oh....so who are we to believe? You? Some random guy apparently from Chicago, who obviously has nothing better to do than ASSume a bunch of crap and insult people instead of offering up any real rebuttals to the theories presented?
Or should we believe the scientists that have the billions of dollars and giant machines and computers to do the research? --------------->INFN said the updated results have been submitted for review and publication in the Journal of High Energy Physics. But ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge reported that about 15 of the experiment's nearly 200 collaborators have declined to lend their names to the journal submission, on the grounds that further confirmation is required.
Andrea Rossi's theories and prototypes have proven themselves true and factual and are a great beginning to a long road to global energy independence.
Come on man...think before you speak. It's embarrassing to read such "drivel."
Oh well. Looks like those boys and girls in the white lab coats will have to go back to work for a living.
For me I don't put much stock into Mr. Einsteins theories since he would refuse to even look into Quantum Mechanics stating he didn't think "god" rolled dices. He believed in an orderly universe when it's far from it. Watching Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" really opens ones eyes although String theory is just that a theory and my never be proved since there is no experiment that they know of now that could prove the theory correct. That makes it more of a philosophy then anything else.
Einstein was a pioneer in quantum physics. He got a Nobel prize for an explanation of the photo-electric effect.
"Dice" is plural, there is no need to add an 's'. Die is the singular, as in roll a die or roll a pair of dice.
TooMany - I think that is quanta, for a packet of light photons. His theories though, did lead scientists to develop quantum physics. The primary researcher who was accredited for developing quantum physics was Richard Feynman. Heisenburg came up with the uncertainity principle, which is part of quantum theory. Einstein thought they were wrong and tried to disprove it. He failed.
I believe it was Bohr who first came up with the idea that electrons and other bits of matter could only exist at certain energetic levels. They make a quantum jump from one level to the next, without ever staying in between.
Neutrinos are still fairly mysterious particles, and I can't help but wonder if this experiment isn't giving us our first true glimpse of evidence for extra-dimensional space-time as so many new theories predict.
Could it be that neutrinos interact so weakly with matter is because they don't spend all of their existence in regular space-time? Einstein asserted that nothing with mass can travel faster than light in space-time, but he never made any claims for particles blinking in and out of space-time.
I'll bet there are already black boards of multidimensional theorists, full of equations and diagrams trying to work this out in time for the 2020 Nobel prize.
i think you be looking at this:
oh, oops, sorry dawgs, here are the links:
nice, short explanations and videos
math proof of god (short version):
onision(dot)net/index.php?/topic/41841-math-proof-of-god-short-version-update-all-youtube-videos-now-from-regular-site/page__fromsearch__1
math proof of god (really short version):
onision(dot)net/index.php?/topic/41844-math-proof-of-god-really-really-short-version/page__fromsearch__1
spirit science (some interesting videos I found on youtube):
onision(dot)net/index.php?/topic/41976-a-forgotten-spirit-science/page__fromsearch__1
merging with the universe:
onision(dot)net/index.php?/topic/41667-the-twilight-zone/page__fromsearch__1
(dot)=.
just replace for filters.
kk, much love, laters.
Ok, lets start by just saying that I am not a Scientist, Physicist, or Mathmatical wiz. Is it not the basic concept of the scientific principal to keep on working to prove something is right, or something is not right? Here is an experiment that has the capability to change the future of mankind, granted that it does need further testing to come to, as minimal, an error percentage as possible to make believers out of other scientist. But even if it is accepted as fact, the continued experimentation could still be carried on, and if this causes a new result, is this not what SCIENCE is all about. The greatest concept of mankind is our ability to keep searching for what-if, no one can be discouraged by the proving of Albert Einsteins Relativity differently, the man had performed his experimentation during a growing period in science. Today we have computers that can make observations much quicker and accurately; however we still need to check our results.
I was unable to duplicate the Italians' result even when using two late-model LED flashlights from Lowe's, a 12' long copper 1/2" pipe, a shirt-cardboard with two precisely poked pinholes and the best stopwatch I could find at Walmart. Therefore I must remain skeptical. Turns out those neutrinos are indeed really small and hard to follow!
Man, science is hard work, guess I'll go back to posting irrelevant cranky wing-nut drivel after every interesting non-political story - no wait, there seems to be a lot of folks already doing that!
Best post of the day
First, don't get your panties in wad over this. The experiment was ran on the same equipment with the parameters tweaked. All they did was to confirm that their equipment reproduced the effect. There needs to be independent verification from other sites. I won't denigrate the work these scientists are doing, they are human and if it is independently verified this would be a tremendous find. They are just not there yet.
I do have questions though. Does anyone know which neutrino types they were firing? Was the light and neutrinos traveling down the same path and if so, could there be a realtivistic interaction going on between the photons and neutrinos? And just so many more that I can't even decide which to propose at this time.
Muon neutrinos were generated. There is no path for light. The neutrinos went through 730km of mother earth (solid rock).
How the f**k do neutrinos do that? I mean, sure, I understand that between the nucleus of an atom and it's electrons there's an incredible amount of "empty space" through which these little bastards are apparently able to pass unobtruded, and even when we're talking about seemingly solid matter, there's permeability to these things, but that begs the question... just what the heck are neutrinos in the first place and how are they generated, controlled and detected if they don't interact with regular matter?
they're very small ..... so small they pass within the orbits of electrons around their atoms... like asteroids pass between the earth and moon sometimes.
Once in awhile a neutrino will crash head-on with an atom and be destroyed...
Yeah....next they will be telling us that the neutrino's change behavior when we are observing them. ;)