Breaking News! Literally! Scientists believe they have now broken one of the most fundamental constants of the physics world; the speed of light!! Pretty neat!!
Hmm… something tells me this is a bit of a double jab… Anyways, so here’s the story… Scientists at CERN have been firing packets of Neutrinos (really tiny thingies that can go through stuff) at a research facility in Italy, over 730 km away, for the last 3 years and all the data suggests that these little itty bitty particles beat the pants off the poster child for speed, the photon, by 60 nanoseconds. Sure, it doesn’t seem like much, but that means these particles traveled 770,400 km/hr FASTER than light. That’s… a big difference. (the current speculation is that these were high energy neutrinos rather than ones of lower energy, which explains why these move faster than ones observed from a “recent” super nova explosion)
What does this mean for science? Well, you know that famous E=MCC (that’s C squared) thing? Well… you can kiss that goodbye. Jump up in your physics class when the teacher talks about relativity and yell out “OBJECTION”! All science books will be burned and rewritten! People will rejoice and riot in the streets- *AHEM* Ok ok, that’s overly dramatic, we’ve still been using the equation, especially in the experiments at CERN when trying to convert virtual field particles to real particles and seeing decent success. But it, more or less, means that the equation is incomplete or not as precise as we’d like to think. Also… it’ll probably undermine the whole of physics and our understanding of the quantum universe. It would put a lot of scientists to work for a while, since we’ll have to change all the books. Golly, it’s a great time to be alive! Such amazing science to be had!
But this all goes back to my “science is belief” thing. Even when all this came out, after 3 years of testing by very VERY smart peoples, and a six-sigma level of certainty (it’s a lot), we STILL have people who argue this with a passion. I mean, think about it… If one day you wake up, read the paper, and realize that everything you knew, everything you’ve been taught to be true and doctrine are claimed as false… it would be maddening! So there’s a lot of angst, resentment, passion, and denial of these findings. Kinda reminds me of that whole “universe doesn’t move around the Earth” thing. Like I’ve said before… the best thing we can do as a science community is to never hold a truth; rather, keep ideas that work and always try to improve or even disprove them. Like springboards… Cause no matter what we think we know now… it will all be laughable in the future.
As such, even these findings you have to consider as a stepping stone. We have the data, we’re trying to root out anything that could potentially be flaws in the logic, but as of right now, we can’t really find any. But that doesn’t mean it wont all turn out to be a function of some kind of quantum mechanic that we don’t know about… and even then, no matter how you look at this news, it still opens up a whole new realm of theories and suppositions and all that jive these sciency folk like to dabble in. Just… really great stuff man! Really great!
Source: AP, The Guardian
Loading ...Oh, and btw… I put up a bunch of avatars in the Swag page! Buuut I’ll post them here for poops and laughs:
I am now sad I will not be able to jump up and shout objection at anyone relevant to this.
eh, never stopped me before… >)
When your theory is based on assumptions based on theories based on assumptions (basicly all of theoretical physics), of course they are going to screw it up and make up gibberish that is eventually disproven. People think we are so smart that we are past disproving most of what we think to be true in the theoretical realm. We aren’t :) .
it’s a bit of a problem when all your theories are stacked up like Jenga… you might be able to take a few of the pegs out, but when you start pulling from the foundation, everything collapses.
we’re a cleaver people though… maybe not the smartest, but cleaver at the very least (think I’m spelling that wrong)… anyways, every time we tear down our beliefs in science, we rebuild them even stronger! kinda like saiyans! so even if we find out all our physics are wrong, we’ll, hopefully, someday rebuild it and maybe get that much closer to how it really works.
either way, whatever comes of this, I’ve got to say that I’m very excited to see how things turn out!
Reminds me the comic where you were elaborating on religion vs science. Peeps are weird creatures
yeah, I think that’s going to end up being an ongoing theme… or at least, a point I’d like to really drive home. not to the point of being preachy though… nobody wants to see that. but when it’s my turn to speak at the beauty pageant, I’m wishing for at least a truce between the science world and the religious. as a great philosopher once said, “can’t we all just get along?”
but yeah, people… very strange critters indeed!
Great philosophers like Impsy, Pimgib or Fizzle? Never ask them about mortgages and best loans..
Science is an unending cycle and it drives from the questions rather than answers…
Sure every year we get a breakthrough and that is good but that shouldn’t neccessarily destroy whole our belief system or anything…Hell if something like that would happen, there wouldn’t be any reason for us to search new things !
Universe is a vast pool and we are just little critters who try to learn it bit by bit… and there is no absolute in life soo I say, bring the new stuff but don’t condemn the old ones. Because you must understand that history leads you to where you are now, respect it ;)
as it should be! just imagine how boring everything would be if we had it all figured out. I for one hope we will always have something new to discover.
Meh, I’ll never be able to travel that fast anyway so it’s not that big of a deal for me.
Now the thing with them stripping Pluto of its planethood… That ticked me off. What did Pluto ever do to them? I mean at the worst he was the ruler of the Underworld (not the bad movie, I mean the Mythic Underworld with all the dead heroes and that) and at best, he’s a harmless lovable dopey dog. All he really had to be taken seriously for was having one itty bitty planet freezing out there. And they took it from him. That’s like stealing the sucker from a baby. Next to that, they can dork around with their sheep for all I care. Wait, some of them already Do do that… That’s gotta be embarrassing… “We uh cloned the sheep Yeah That’s it… That’s what we were doing out there in the pasture with all those… Hot… Slutty… Sheep… What was the question again??”
[shakes head]
Don’t get me wrong, Science is a wonderful religion as far as they go. At least it’s easier on the knees. It’s just… Some times, I think maybe I’m a little too conservative to take some of these ladies and fellows terribly seriously.
I still want them to keep at the things like stem cell research and that, I just wish some of their “finds” were a little more dignified and a little less like something you’d catch late on the Jerry Springer Show. >>;
I guess personally it wont effect most of us much… but where it really starts to muck things up is in the whole of theoretical physics. A LOT of equations use “c” as a constant in a vacuum, so it pretty much messes that up. But in all fairness, it’s not like they don’t have non-”c” based backup equations. Still… it does mess up a lot of other theories, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes of all this.
ha! well, yes… sometimes when we see things like “we grew a mouse with a laser canon in its chest using stem cells” it’s a bit perplexing… but it’s all just pieces of the bigger puzzle. sure some of the little things seem insignificant on their own, but hopefully together they give us a better understanding… then again… who wouldn’t want stem cell laser canons… hmmm…. >)
then again, who says science can’t be just for fun? like the evil robot says, “we do what we must because we can”! XD
hold on E=MCC is (energy)=(mass )X (the speed of light squared) the speed of light hasnt changed it is still the speed of light so it doesnt really turn that on its head that is still relative unlike the theory of relativity which is nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. that got abolished but ummmmm yeah im not a particle physicist or anything
well, yes… true… but what is happening is that “E=m times a very large number”, we thought the speed of light squared was the max and so it would be reliable and fitting… but this just causes problems now. I think what it will insinuate is that the equation for Energy may not be accurate. when you get down to it, the equation is for Force. F=ma (Force = mass times acceleration) and C squared IS acceleration at the speed of light… so, pretty much it was used as constant and really large number.
there’s probably a lot more little intricate things, but without other research on the subject, it just seems to be that even though E=MCC works, it might not be completely accurate.
like I said… it won’t cause rioting in the streets and the sun to explode, but it might make us have to rethink how and why we use the speed of light as a constant. I’d wager a good majority of those equations will need little to no work, since they’ve done alright with it so far, but it just means it won’t be as accurate as we thought.
it may turn out that it only needs the speed of light to work and even though there is faster, it’s that number that works best. but what is happening now is that we have to reevaluate how we use it and if it is accurate or not.
anyways, probably the only ones that’ll care about this are all the quantum peoples… but it’s still fascinating that we still have so much to learn.
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