20 replies to this topic

[steve6375]

news just in - Einstein was wrong!

[MedEvil]

Yep, good news also for QNX.

Spoiler

It uses a Neutrino Kernel!

[Brito]

[Mikorist]

http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

[Mikorist]

Via faster-than-light (FTL) travel (Wikipedia)


If one were able to move information or matter from one point to another faster than light, then according to special relativity, there would be some inertial frame of reference in which the signal or object was moving backward in time. This is a consequence of the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity, which says that in some cases different reference frames will disagree on whether two events at different locations happened "at the same time" or not, and they can also disagree on the order of the two events (technically, these disagreements occur when the spacetime interval between the events is 'space-like', meaning that neither event lies in the future light cone of the other). If one of the two events represents the sending of a signal from one location and the second event represents the reception of the same signal at another location, then as long as the signal is moving at the speed of light or slower, the mathematics of simultaneity ensures that all reference frames agree that the transmission-event happened before the reception-event.
However, in the case of a hypothetical signal moving faster than light, there would always be some frames in which the signal was received before it was sent, so that the signal could be said to have moved backwards in time. And since one of the two fundamental postulates of special relativity says that the laws of physics should work the same way in every inertial frame, then if it is possible for signals to move backwards in time in any one frame, it must be possible in all frames. This means that if observer A sends a signal to observer B which moves FTL (faster than light) in A's frame but backwards in time in B's frame, and then B sends a reply which moves FTL in B's frame but backwards in time in A's frame, it could work out that A receives the reply before sending the original signal, a clear violation of causality in every frame. An illustration of such a scenario using spacetime diagrams can be found here.




space time continuum

[steve6375]

Just a thought, but I wonder if they have allowed for the rotation of the Earth when sending Neutrinos from Geneva to Gran Sasso?
[Edit]Seems they did!
Starting with Global Positioning System measurements, then upgrading the readings by sophisticated means, they measured the distance traveled — some 454 miles — to within eight inches. They factored in the rotation of the Earth, which moves ever so slightly in the flash it takes neutrinos to zoom that far. They even stopped traffic in a tunnel running through Gran Sasso mountain to calibrate their instruments.

http://www.washingto...JzqK_story.html

[/Edit]
I wonder if they factored in the movement of the Earth (our expanding Galaxy) through space...

[MedEvil]

Never understood, how people wouild come up with the idea, that faster than light travel could violate causality.
Even things traveling faster than light, still need time to get to their target.
So before we could have things traveling back in time, we would first need things traveling instantaneous.

[billonious]

Chuck Norris kicks faster than the speed of light. Einstein was wrong.

[Wonko the Sane]

Spoiler

Chuck Norris kicks faster than the speed of light. Einstein was wrong.

Yeah.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

AFAIK Chuck and Albert were close friends, so I wouldn't go around babbling about Mr. Einstein being wrong ....


Wonko

[Mikorist]

This Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Evidence!

"Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules." -Douglas Adams
My inbox is on fire today with messages about this story about neutrinos breaking the speed of light:
What's going on here? A group (a large group, mind you) of physicists known as the OPERA collaboration have made a neutrino beam, and have been studying it for the past few years.
Making a neutrino beam is the easiest type of beam to make, by the way. All you do is shoot a bunch of high-energy particles into the Earth, like so.
(Image credit: CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso.)
You shoot a high-energy beam of protons into a fixed target, and you make all sorts of unstable particles -- things like pions, kaons and other mesons -- which have a lifetime of at most a paltry few nanoseconds.
You focus this beam very tightly, so that the decay products you get out travel in a narrowly collimated beam as well. What are these decay products?
Among other things, you get a bunch of high-energy muon neutrinos. And if you fire it through the Earth, everything that isn't a neutrino gets wiped out in short order by the intervening atomic material.
But the muon neutrinos, for the most part, pass straight through the Earth uninhibited. Why? Because neutrinos hardly interact with anything at all! We've built neutrino beams like this before: from Fermilab (in Batavia, Illinois) to Minnesota, from KEK (in Japan) to Super-Kamiokande, and others.
And what we'd expect, based on measurements of neutrino mass, is that these particles should be traveling at almost, but just a hair under the speed of light!
And then you go and detect your neutrino.
But I just said they don't interact with anything! So how do you do this?
(Image credit: Super-Kamiokande.)
You build a giant tank of something liquid for neutrinos to interact with. And although nearly all of your neutrinos pass right through it, every once in a while, one neutrino undergoes an interaction (through the weak force) with one of the atoms in your detector!
And when it does, because of how hugely energetic these neutrinos are, you produce either a muon (for a mu-neutrino) or an electron (for an electron-neutrino) that's moving close to the speed of light in vacuum, and faster than the speed of light in your liquid!
(Image credit: Georgia State University.)
When you move faster than the speed of light in a medium, you give off a special type of light known as Čerenkov radiation. If you line the outer rim of your neutrino detector tank with photomultiplier tubes, you can not only detect this radiation, you can use the information from it to reconstruct exactly where and when, in your tank, this neutrino interacted with one of your atoms!
(Image credit: Tomasz Barszczak.)
Now, in the past, we've found that these neutrinos move, more or less, at the speed of light in vacuum (c), as expected. One experiment based out of Chicago, a few years ago, found marginal evidence that neutrinos might move just a tiny bit faster than the speed of light, at 1.000051 (+/- 0.000029) c.
Of course, this result is consistent with neutrinos moving at or slower than the speed of light; the errors are not significantly smaller than the measured difference from c. So OPERA, whose detector is shown below, performed this measurement with great care, and announced their results today.
The 730 kilometer trip should have taken these neutrinos 2.43 milliseconds, were they traveling at the speed of light. But according to the OPERA collaboration, the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected, with a claimed uncertainty of only ten nanoseconds!
Translating that into a measurement for the speed of neutrinos, that means they are traveling at 1.0000247 (+/- 0.0000041) c.
Now, measurement at this level of precision is not easy, and I am certainly not going to be the first person to come out and say I don't believe, based on this, that neutrinos move faster than the speed of light. (But, as one of many, I don't.)
Because there's a much better constraint out there on the speed of high-energy neutrinos from some time ago. Above is a Hubble Space Telescope time-sequenced image of the closest supernova in my lifetime: Supernova 1987A, which took place in the Large Magellanic Cloud 168,000 light-years away.
This supernova was discovered, optically, on February 24, 1987. About three hours earlier, 23 neutrinos were detected over a timespan of less than 13 seconds. The reason for the 3 hour delay? When the core of a star collapses (in a type II supernova; see here), most of the energy is radiated away in the form of neutrinos, which pass freely through the outer material of the star, while the emission of visible light occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface.
(Image credit: TeraScale Supernova Initiative.)
However!
Even if you assume that the light and neutrinos were created at the same time, but the visible light moved at c and the neutrinos moved faster than light, which is why they got here first, know what value you'd get for the speed of these neutrinos?
1.0000000020 c, which is inconsistent with the results from the OPERA collaboration.
Now, something fishy and possibly very interesting is going on, and there will certainly be scientists weighing in with new analysis in the coming weeks. But in all the excitement of this group declaring that they observe neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light, don't forget what we've already observed to much greater precision! And be skeptical of this result, and of the interpretation that neutrinos are moving faster than light, until we know more.


http://scienceblogs....claim_requi.php

[billonious]

Spoiler

Yeah.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

AFAIK Chuck and Albert were close friends, so I wouldn't go around babbling about Mr. Einstein being wrong ....


Wonko

[Mikorist]

By MICHIO KAKU

Einstein wrong? Impossible!

That was the reaction of physicists around the world last week when they heard that experiments in Switzerland indicate that Einstein's theory of relativity might be wrong. Since 1905, when Einstein declared that nothing in the universe could travel faster than light, the theory has been the bedrock of modern physics. Indeed, most of our high-tech wizardry depends on it.

Of course, crackpots have been denouncing Einstein's theory of relativity for years. Like many physicists, I have boxes full of self-published monographs that were mailed to me from people who claim that Einstein was wrong. In the 1930s the Nazi Party criticized Einstein's theory, publishing a book called "100 Authorities Denounce Relativity." Einstein later quipped that you don't need 100 famous intellectuals to disprove his theory. All you need is one simple fact.

Well, that simple fact may be in the form of the latest experiments at the largest particle accelerators in the world, based at CERN, outside Geneva. Physicists fired a beam of neutrinos (exotic, ghost-like particles that can penetrate even the densest of materials) from Switzerland to Italy, over a distance of 454 miles. Much to their amazement, after analyzing 15,000 neutrinos, they found that they traveled faster than the speed of light—one 60-billionth of a second faster, to be precise. In a billionth of a second, a beam of light travels about one foot. So a difference of 60 feet was quite astonishing.

Cracking the light barrier violated the core of Einstein's theory. According to relativity, as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, you get heavier, and you also get flatter (all of which have been measured in the lab). But if you go faster than light, then the impossible happens. Time goes backward. You are lighter than nothing, and you have negative width. Since this is ridiculous, you cannot go faster than light, said Einstein.

The OPERA neutrinos detector.

The CERN announcement was electrifying. Some physicists burst out with glee, because it meant that the door was opening to new physics (and more Nobel Prizes). New, daring theories would need to be proposed to explain this result. Others broke out in a cold sweat, realizing that the entire foundation of modern physics might have to be revised. Every textbook would have to be rewritten, every experiment recalibrated.

Cosmology, the very way we think of space, would be forever altered. The distance to the stars and galaxies and the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) would be thrown in doubt. Even the expanding universe theory, the Big Bang theory, and black holes would have to be re-examined.

Moreover, everything we think we understand about nuclear physics would need to be reassessed. Every school kid knows Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, where a small amount of mass M can create a vast amount of energy E, because the speed of light C squared is such a huge number. But if C is off, it means that all nuclear physics has to be recalibrated. Nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and radioactive dating would be affected because all nuclear reactions are based on Einstein's relation between matter and energy.

If all this wasn't bad enough, it would also mean that the fundamental principles of physics are incorrect. Modern physics is based on two theories, relativity and the quantum theory, so half of modern physics would have to be replaced by a new theory. My own field, string theory, is no exception. Personally, I would have to revise all my theories because relativity is built into string theory from the very beginning.

How will this astonishing result play out? As Carl Sagan once said, remarkable claims require remarkable proof. Laboratories around the world, like Fermilab outside Chicago, will redo the CERN experiments and try to falsify or verify their results.

My gut reaction, however, is that this is a false alarm. Over the decades, there have been numerous challenges to relativity, all of them proven wrong. In the 1960s, for example, physicists were measuring the tiny effect of gravity upon a light beam. In one study, physicists found that the speed of light seemed to oscillate with the time of day. Amazingly, the speed of light rose during the day, and fell at night. Later, it was found that, since the apparatus was outdoors, the sensors were affected by the temperature of daylight.

Reputations may rise and fall. But in the end, this is a victory for science. No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.

Mr. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, is the author of "Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100" (Doubleday, 2011).


http://online.wsj.co...2498620624.html


He is the main authority for physics of the Impossible!


http://en.wikipedia...._the_Impossible

[Wonko the Sane]

@billonius

Spoiler

@Mikorist
Even when he is right, MICHIO KAKU is wrong, or stoopid, or both.
This is PURE NONSENSE:

Moreover, everything we think we understand about nuclear physics would need to be reassessed. Every school kid knows Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, where a small amount of mass M can create a vast amount of energy E, because the speed of light C squared is such a huge number. But if C is off, it means that all nuclear physics has to be recalibrated. Nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and radioactive dating would be affected because all nuclear reactions are based on Einstein's relation between matter and energy.

Nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and radioactive dating, won't be affected, they will continue working EXACTLY as they did till now, only the explanation about HOW ( the reason WHY exactly) they do work might slightly change.
A ten year old can tell you that in the THEORETICAL E=MC2 equation the 2 means "to the power of two" and being the speed of light around 299792458 metres per second, finding that something can travel slightly faster, either 1.0000247 (+/- 0.0000041) c or 1.0000000020 c would still make it quite accurate.
When someone will manage to move a very little mass to the square of c, then we will know whether the theoretical equation holds true or if you need to move that little mass a little bit faster to get energy or if equation is completely wrong.


Wonko

[steve6375]

We still have a long way to go before we start talking about what it means if the neutrinos are travelling faster than light.
First we have to be sure that the measurements are correct. That is both distance and time were accurate.
Next we have to be sure that there were not external factors - for instance added energy due to an external force or changing mass (maybe a neutrino loses mass in some weird way).
We need to be sure about the 'frame of reference' in which the measurements were made - i.e. neutrinos travelling through a moving solid body (the Earth) located in a planetary system inside a galaxy inside an expanding universe (cf. light from a moving train).
Finally we have to be sure that we know what 'c' really is (down to the last decimal place) and that we have accurately measured it in the first place. Maybe photons travelling through a vacuum is not (quite) the fastest that something can travel or maybe we are measuring the speed of light in an environment that is not quite as 'pure' as we think but neutrinos are not subjected to the same outside force(s) as photons?

[Mikorist]

Nikola Tesla's Radient Energy System
Bruce A. Perreault


NIKOLA TESLA'S RADIANT ENERGY SYSTEM
Brooklyn Eagle July 10, 1932
Nikola Tesla states: I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device. Cosmic ray investigation is a subject that is very close to me. I was the first to discover these rays and I naturally feel toward them as I would toward my own flesh and blood. I have advanced a theory of the cosmic rays and at every step of my investigations I have found it completely justified. The attractive features of the cosmic rays is their constancy. They shower down on us throughout the whole 24 hours, and if a plant is developed to use their power it will not require devices for storing energy as would be necessary with devices using wind, tide or sunlight. All of my investigations seem to point to the conclusion that they are small particles, each carrying so small a charge that we are justified in calling them neutrons. They move with great velocity, exceeding that of light. More than 25 years ago I began my efforts to harness the cosmic rays and I can now state that I have succeeded in operating a motive device by means of them. I will tell you in the most general way, the cosmic ray ionizes the air, setting free many charges ions and electrons. These charges are captured in a condenser which is made to discharge through the circuit of the motor. I have hopes of building my motor on a large scale, but circumstances have not been favorable to carrying out my plan.
Device to Harness Cosmic Energy Claimed by Tesla: New York American November 1st, 1933
"This new power for the driving of the world's machinery will be derived from the energy which operates the universe, the cosmic energy, whose central source for the earth is the sun and which is everywhere present in unlimited quantities."
This is a diagram of Tesla's first radiant energy receiver. It stored static electricity obtained from the air and converted it to a usable form. Tesla's invention is a simple version of T.H. Moray's device. Moray's device used a unique rectifier (RE-valve) to efficiently capture the static electricity from the surrounding air. Moray's oscillator tubes (magnetron transducers) utilized this high-voltage energy to generate an internal secondary "cold" fusion reaction.
Stick an antenna up in the air, the higher the better, and wire it to one side of a capacitor, the other going to a good earth ground, and the potential difference will then charge the capacitor. Connect across the capacitor some sort of switching device so that it can be discharged at rhythmic intervals, and you have an oscillating electric output. T.H. Moray simply expanded on Tesla's idea to use high-voltage to create ionic oscillation.
Tesla's free-energy concept was patented in 1901 as an "Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy." The patent refers to "the sun, as well as other sources of radiant energy, like cosmic rays," that the device works at night is explained in terms of the nighttime availability of cosmic rays. Tesla also refers to the ground as "a vast reservoir of negative electricity."
Tesla was fascinated by radiant energy and its free-energy possibilities. He called the Crooke's radiometer, a device which has vanes that spin in a vacuum when exposed to radiant energy "a beautiful invention." He believed that it would become possible to harness energy directly by "connecting to the very wheel-work of nature." On his 76th birthday at his yearly ritual press conference, Tesla announced a "cosmic-ray motor" when asked if it was more powerful than the Crooke's radiometer, he answered, "thousands of times more powerful."
In 1901 Nikola Tesla was one the first to identify "radiant energy." Tesla says that the source of this energy is our Sun. He concluded that the Sun emits small particles, each carrying so small of a charge, that they move with great velocity, exceeding that of light. Tesla further states that these particles are the neutron particles. Tesla believed that these neutron particles were responsible for all radioactive reactions. Radiant matter is in tune with these neutron particles. Radiant matter is simply a re-transmitter of energy at one state to another”


http://www.nuenergy.org/alt/tesla_energy.htm


1921 photograph attached, at the "Marconi" transmitter site in New Brunswick, NJ with some of the greatest minds of the time in the United States all together when "wireless" communication and electrical transmission existed and was being practiced. What is really going on here in New York and New Jersey ??

http://en.wikipedia....Somerset_01.jpg

From left to right are: three unidentified men, David Sarnoff, Thomas J. Hayden, Ernst Julius Berg, S. Benedict, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, A.N. Goldsmith, A. Malsin, Irving Langmuir, Albert W. Hull, E.B. Pillsbury, Saul Dushman, Richard Howland Ranger, George Ashley Campbell and two unidentified men.

[Mikorist]

http://www.scribd.co...RNSBACK19311100


This statement is even stronger - 2 x faster than light - with electrons

Thanks to http://tesla.hu/

[MedEvil]

I can't stand Michiu Kaku.
Read once a book by him and thought, good that he's a scientists, as writing obviously isn't his thing.

Saw him again a year or two ago in a own tv show, where he wanted to explain, how scifi tech could really work. Each show opened up with him stating that he is a scientist and scifi fan. Didn't stop him from usually botchering up both the science and the scifi reference. :roll:

But if you go faster than light, then the impossible happens. Time goes backward. You are lighter than nothing, and you have negative width. Since this is ridiculous, you cannot go faster than light, said Einstein.

Here again someone eighter just blindly believes in the theory or has some serious problems with math.
Nothing get's negative. Einsteins equations work just as fine for faster than light, than for slower than light.

[Wonko the Sane]

I can't stand Michiu Kaku.

That is good.

@billonius

Spoiler

Wonko

[Brito]

So, the bartender says, "sorry, we're closed." Two neutrinos walk into a bar.
~anonymous

[Wonko the Sane]

As expected :
http://www.mid-day.c...t-after-all.htm
http://news.sciencem...oes-faster.html


Wonko

[MedEvil]

but now the lab behind it says the result could have been caused by a loose cable.

If loose cables can make neutrinos travel faster than light. I wonder, how much faster my car will go, when i loosen the wheels?