Tuesday, September 27

faster than fast

I wonder what would the gang of Dr. Sheldon Cooper says about this development.


Particles Moved Faster Than Speed of Light?
Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published September 23, 2011


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.
...
Relativity Still Very Close to Right

Even if the OPERA results are confirmed by other scientists, they wouldn't totally invalidate Einstein's theories of general and special relativity, Stanford University's Strigari stressed. Those theories still explain a remarkable range of observed phenomena in the universe.

"I think it's long been understood that the theories we have today aren't the full answers," Strigari said.

"If this observation holds up, then it's probably a good piece of evidence that the theories we currently have need to be reworked."

Drexel University's Goldberg agreed that physicists won't be discarding Einstein's theories anytime soon.

"Even if relativity turned out to be wrong," he said, "it's clearly very, very close to being right."

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Here's how physicist converse... nosebleed. LOL

  1. Andrew Foland says:
    September 23, 2011 at 3:12 pm
    The coordinate system used in their geodesy note linked above is Cartesian. Should you doubt that, you can take the square root of the sum the squares of the locations in Table 1 and find that it equals the earth’s radius. So they did not goof on curvilinear coordinates (at least, not in this way.)
    Reply
  2. Conan776 says:
    September 23, 2011 at 4:34 pm
    Shouldn’t measuring the distance between two locations on Earth by the use of a satellite in orbit involve parabolas somehow, simply because the the Earth’s gravitational well? And so, like an object in a parabolic side-view mirror, the two locations might be closer than they appear?
    Reply
  3. scott gray says:
    September 23, 2011 at 5:42 pm
    Reply
  4. Joseph Bridgewater says:
    September 23, 2011 at 7:24 pm
    Can we review the design and simulation models for the FPGA used for time stamping?
    Reply
And if you wish to replicate and actually test the experiment, here's where you can download the OPERA paper.


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