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Author Topic:   Einstein is rolling over in His Grave, or Cern makes a big mistake
Rahvin
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Posts: 4039
Joined: 07-01-2005
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Message 26 of 74 (635476)
09-29-2011 12:33 PM
Reply to: Message 21 by RAZD
09-29-2011 10:30 AM


Re: but do you c what I c?
But if this new experimental result is just a refinement of the actual speed of light what happens?
Then our understanding about a thousand other subjects suddenly needs to be rewritten. The reason we know c so accurately isn;t because we have super-good clocks and speedometers, it's because we can accurately measure other phenomenon than just racing photons, phenomenon like the energy released in matter-antimatter reactions. If c were wrong, those results (and thousands of others) would have shown us by now.

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 Message 21 by RAZD, posted 09-29-2011 10:30 AM RAZD has seen this message but not replied

  
Rahvin
Member
Posts: 4039
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 8.2


Message 33 of 74 (635550)
09-29-2011 6:11 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by AZPaul3
09-29-2011 6:00 PM


Re: So what is different?
Neutrino mass is less important than their lack of a charge. Most matter interactions, after all, are electromagnetic repulsion between electrons in atomic orbits.
Since atoms are mostly just empty space and neutrinos have no charge to attract or repel them from either the electron shell or the protons in the nucleus, they just pass right on through.
The low mass of a neutrino does mean that it can move faster. Accelerating a non-zero mass toward the speed of light requires more and more energy scaling to infinity, so you can never quite get there, but the low mass of a neutrino lets it get pretty close.
Photons, of course, are absorbed by atoms and re-emitted (in transparent substances anyway), and this slows light down (even though the actual photons always move at c, every time they strike another atom there's a delay as it's absorbed and re-emitted). It's why c is specifically the speed of light in a vacuum.

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 Message 32 by AZPaul3, posted 09-29-2011 6:00 PM AZPaul3 has replied

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