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Author | Topic: Einstein is rolling over in His Grave, or Cern makes a big mistake | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
cavediver Member (Idle past 3644 days) Posts: 4129 From: UK Joined:
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but could you put in layman's terms what a zero mass particle that exists in velocities exceeding c would mean...? First off, tachyons are not massless. Something that is massless travels at c. Tachyons have mass, but just to cause greater confusion, that mass is imaginary, i.e. the squared mass is negative.
What would the confirmation of the existance of such a particle mean in practical terms, for us social "science" types who don't have the background in mathematics or the phycial sciences to appreciate such concepts on paper? If any? Not much. We know that GPS works, that particle accelerators work, etc, so SR and GR are good approximations of reality. But to those of us in fundemental phsyics, if it is not a mistake, and if it is not a "cheat" (some higher-dimensional physics leaking into the experiemnt) then it is not far from discovering that 2+2=5. Everyone is asking what are the ramifications of this result if true, and we're floundering around trying to work out what the result actually means! At this stage we have no idea. Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 1.9 |
A related article on tachyons.
Can We Travel Backwards in Time
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ramoss Member (Idle past 613 days) Posts: 3228 Joined: |
And, not surprising,
Flaw is discovered in the experiment Darn, it would have been so fun to blow people's mind.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9489 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
cavediver writes: First off, tachyons are not massless. Something that is massless travels at c. Tachyons have mass, but just to cause greater confusion, that mass is imaginary, i.e. the squared mass is negative. sheesh.....that was the layman's explanation? I'm going fishing.......Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
The article you link to seems to have gone through the usual science press mangle.
A slightly fuller account on ZDnet goes into a bit more detail on the nature of the technical problems. It also passes on a statement from CERN's spokesman that even if these problems are verified it doesn't necessarily mean that they were extant at the time of the previous experiments. So a definitive answer will need the problems to be eliminated and the experiment performed again. It does seem quite likely that the result is going to be that the fault giving an overestimate was the cause of the previous results, just on the grounds of it being a more reasonable explanation than a huge tranche of our current understanding of physics being radically wrong. TTFN, WK
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
ramoss writes: Darn, it would have been so fun to blow people's mind. If the supraluminal transmission results prove out it will be absolutely mind-blowing to science and probably initiate a period of both new theory and new discovery. I personally don't believe they'll prove out, but if they did, wow! This love of new discovery is what creationists think is absent in science. They see science as paranoidly defending the status quo when all we're really doing is following the evidence trail. We would love it if actual scientific evidence were uncovered of a young earth or a designer. It isn't these ideas in themselves that we decry but the lack of evidence. --Percy
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2132 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
CERN Press release, Feb 23, 2012:
The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May.
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Not so fast: Second experiment refutes faster-than-light particles:
Anyone who bet against Einstein better get out their wallet... --Percy
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1.61803 Member (Idle past 1504 days) Posts: 2928 From: Lone Star State USA Joined: |
From the Article: "The new results pile on to revelations last month that a loose cable may have compromised the original experiment, called OPERA."
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
From Page Not Found | Reuters:
(Reuters) - The Italian professor who led an experiment which initially appeared to challenge one of the fundaments of modern physics by showing particles moving faster than the speed of light, has resigned after the finding was overturned earlier this month. Seems a bit of an overreaction. Mistakes are part of science. --Percy
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Perdition Member (Idle past 3238 days) Posts: 1593 From: Wisconsin Joined: |
Seems a bit of an overreaction. Mistakes are part of science. I agree, it seems like a bit of an overreaction, but he may be resigning, not for being wrong, but for shooting the unverified results into the media. Still, it got people really interested in science for a bit, so I don't see that any harm was done. It showed how science works best.
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Taq Member Posts: 9975 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
Seems a bit of an overreaction. Mistakes are part of science. I agree. They even stated that they probably had made a mistake, and were asking the scientific community to find it for them after they had spent 3 months trying to do that very thing. If the rumor is true that the faulty measurements may have been caused by a loose wire I can understand the embarrassment. I remember spending 3 weeks trying to get a specific expression clone to work only to find that I had left out a single base in one of my primers. It was an extremely simple and embarrassing mistake and I was sure that my bosses were going to rip me a new one. They didn't, and I learned an invaluable lesson. I would hope that a colleague would have tried to talk him out of resigning. Eating humble pie sucks, but it does make you a better scientist.
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jar Member (Idle past 395 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
He's Italian.
I think it was a mistake to resign if the reason was this experiment since that is a great example of how science works. But he's Italian.Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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Tangle Member Posts: 9489 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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That's a damn shame if true. I thought it was a great piece of scientific honesty declaring a result that they couldn't themselves believe to be true and ask for help and confirmation.
I really dislike the idea that you have to resign for making that kind of mistake - it's not what science stands for.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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