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c9So experiments at CERN appear to have shown subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light. This is exciting and annoying.
Exciting because it potentially blasts apart the theory of relativity and means a major rethink of physics is required -- this is a normal part of science and means we are getting better at knowing our universe. Don't panic.
The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.
I've always found the speed-of-light barrier annoying. I understand the physics (short version: to go that fast you'd have to expend infinite energy) but I've always thought about it in the "just keep accelerating" way. They used to think the sound barrier was a big deal, and now you break that going to work. Not really.
One nice thing is that we already know the answer to all this. Since Arthur C Clarke is from the future, if faster-than-light travel were possible he'd have included it in his books. So no worries.
Exciting because it potentially blasts apart the theory of relativity and means a major rethink of physics is required -- this is a normal part of science and means we are getting better at knowing our universe. Don't panic.
CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormity of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.
The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.
I've always found the speed-of-light barrier annoying. I understand the physics (short version: to go that fast you'd have to expend infinite energy) but I've always thought about it in the "just keep accelerating" way. They used to think the sound barrier was a big deal, and now you break that going to work. Not really.
One nice thing is that we already know the answer to all this. Since Arthur C Clarke is from the future, if faster-than-light travel were possible he'd have included it in his books. So no worries.
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Date: 2011-09-23 07:32 am (UTC)That is incorrect. Deviations from special relativity theory have been found in the past, but they have simply been ignored by most physicists.
The failure of Michelson-Morley type experiments to find Ether-drift is said to be one of the main experimental results supporting Einstein. But the historical MM experiments never actually found the "null" results that is now attributed to them by modern writers. They obtained ether shifts that were significantly smaller than those predicted by the stationary ether hypothesis, but not zero within the error bounds of the experiments.
In other words, the very experiments that students today are taught confirm relativity were at a slight variance with it.
Now professional physicists would all tell you that this was all resolved in favor of special relativity long ago, but that is simply not true. In fact, this foundational issue has remained unresolved to this very day:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0375960104015221
To give you a brief summary of that paper: while it is true that modern MM experiments have found exceedingly accurate null results (confirming special relativity), those experiments were all performed in a vacuum, while the older experiments were performed in gaseous media. Consoli's analysis predicts that ether-drift effects would always cancel out in vaccum experiments, but be clearly visible in gas-mode experiments.