Thread: Roll over Einstein: Pillar of physics challenged

I never understood the constraints we put ourselves under with the scientific laws we come up with. Just because we haven't ever seen something doesn't mean it's not possible.

Originally Posted by Dale Mabry

I never understood the constraints we put ourselves under with the scientific laws we come up with. Just because we haven't ever seen something doesn't mean it's not possible.

Creating these limitations acts as springboard for exploring ideas, no?

since the mass of an object increases as it nears light speed then the neutrinos have no mass which would make sense. i'm guessing these are not your normal sub-atomic particles, I wonder how they are made.

Neutrino seeds and water, of course.

Duh.

Originally Posted by LAM

since the mass of an object increases as it nears light speed then the neutrinos have no mass which would make sense. i'm guessing these are not your normal sub-atomic particles, I wonder how they are made.

They have mass.

Originally Posted by troubador

They have mass.

I had to look up non zero mass since I haven't taken calculus or physics in almost 10 years, but from what I gather, the only reason the term nonzero mass is even used is because our mathematical systems do not allow us to have 0 in the denominator of a fraction.

Am I wrong to say that the neutrinos can't be defined as having mass or not having mass, because the expression is undefined?

Originally Posted by Dale Mabry

I never understood the constraints we put ourselves under with the scientific laws we come up with. Just because we haven't ever seen something doesn't mean it's not possible.

It was never a law, it was a theory. Scientific method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Solar, atmospheric, and reactor experiments have all conclusively shown that neutrinos possess a small, yet finite, mass. Limits from previous experiments place the neutrino mass at less than 2 eV, while limits from oscillitory experiments place a lower bound of 50 meV on the neutrino mass. The effects of neutrino mass within this scale (50-2000 eV) will have a direct impact on galaxy evolution and cosmology.

MIT's Neutrino and Dark Matter Group

In 2001, analysis of data from SNO, supported by other experiments, confirmed that the sun does indeed produce the predicted number of electron neutrinos and that these do indeed transform themselves into muon and tau neutrinos before they reach detectors on Earth.

Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers designed and constructed the geodesic support structure for SNO’s array of 10,000 photomultiplier tubes. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt)
Our ignorance instantly multiplied. Gone was the Standard Model’s massless neutrino traveling at the speed of light. In order to exchange identities, neutrinos have to have mass, if only a little, with a different mass for each flavor. But how much do neutrinos weigh? Which flavor is the heaviest?

Berkeley Lab: Year of Science: Nature

I don't know much about it but I believe anything in motion has mass and anything said to be massless refers only to 'rest mass'. Not that neutrinos have zero rest mass.

Originally Posted by troubador

MIT's Neutrino and Dark Matter Group


Berkeley Lab: Year of Science: Nature

I don't know much about it but I believe anything in motion has mass and anything said to be massless refers only to 'rest mass'. Not that neutrinos have zero rest mass.

Well that answers my question pretty good.

Originally Posted by danzik17

It was never a law, it was a theory. Scientific method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am referring to the laws of physics, life requiring water, etc.

scientific theories stand on their own until it's knocked down. They never claim to be absolutely correct, that is the dogma for religion. If the set of principles that explain observations verified by numerous experiments is challenged by a new set of observations and experiments, then, that is healthy for the scientific community.

i'm not a physicist but my question is how do we know there isn't an error in the measurement of the speed? The margin, while significant, is still awfully close in my mind to "human error" ( In my field, that is how a lot of false negatives or positives , how we "measure" the variable).

I'm just a dumb lab jockey in this field of physics, these extreme precision in time and distance measurements - at a 60 nanosecond differential, the innate electronic errors probably become significant although it looks like cern performed the experiment 15,000 times before reporting results. I never had to deal with such precision when I was just blowing up stuff in the lab as chemist.

I'm no physicist but I know enough quantum to look like an educated idiot.

Neutrinos are quantum particles, right? The "no faster than light proposition" .....isn't that only applicable directly to particles whose trajectory, in the classical sense, is well defined And quantum particles don't follow classical behavior. To me this experiment seems to show that neutrinos have a defined trajectory, which now seems at odd with QM, in my mind, but I may be misinterpreting. I think that the result, as stated in the media, is inconclusive because quantum effects would make impossible to detect such small deviations from c because the entire notion of trajectory is ill defined...therefore, I think it may shake up QED more than SR and GR

. a real physicist may interject and straighten me out any time.......

Originally Posted by bandaidwoman

Scientific theories stand on their own until it's knocked down. They never claim to be absolutely correct, that is the dogma for religion. If the set of principles that explain observations verified by numerous experiments is challenged by a new set of observations and experiments, then, that is healthy for the scientific community.

just an update provided to me by my physicist brother

Critics take aim at fast neutrinos
Lack of energy trail suggests finding was miscalculated
By Devin Powell
November 5th, 2011; Vol.180 #10 (p. 10)

A new study puts the brakes on faster-than-light neutrinos.

In September, a group at Italy’s OPERA experiment reportedly clocked neutrinos traveling the 730 kilometers from CERN in Switzerland to Italy’s underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory about 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have covered that distance in a vacuum (SN: 10/22/11, p. 18). But if this were true, most of the neutrinos would have shed energy en route, a new analysis by Boston University physicists suggests.

<snip>

“We’re pretty much convinced that the experiment is wrong,” says Glashow. “But I don’t think anyone has identified the error, if there is an error, as of yet.”

Pretty much all of this went over my head.

But I do have one question:

When is my time machine gonna be ready???

Originally Posted by bandaidwoman

just an update provided to me by my physicist brother

Not So fast lady;


Second experiment indicates faster-than-light particles - The Washington Post

A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light — stunning the world of physics — has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday.

Originally Posted by Thee_One

Not So fast lady;


Second experiment indicates faster-than-light particles - The Washington Post

technically this isn't a replication of results so it's the first experiment. I think the science journalist didn't see the other story. We start over gain. Now let's see if data analysis of this one holds up like it didn't with the first one and see if they can consistently replicate the data, that is the true test of any scientific data, especially in my field.

This makes sense to me, neutrinos can pass through matter so there is not much out there to impede it or drag it down therefore seeming to travel faster than we think light travels, but light can be impeded and we might not have its vacuum speed correct(we would have to measure it in a perfect vacuum).

How about that guy who says they are jumping dimensions and that's why they are seemingly faster....


Is dark faster than light? I always wondered that....

Originally Posted by maniclion

Is dark faster than light? I always wondered that....

darkness is the absence/lack of visible light

Originally Posted by LAM

darkness is the absence/lack of visible light

Don't be so sure.


Think Yin and Yang.


They are simply opposite ends of one unified spectrum.


Look up dark matter and dark energy if you don't believe me.

Originally Posted by LAM

darkness is the absence/lack of visible light

It must be the presence of something unless we are outside the edge of the universe, though there is the school of thought that even out there there is something....

When I was a little kid though when the lights were turned out I'd think about the Nothing in NeverEnding Story and wonder if the Nothing could move faster than light, and if thats what Einstein meant by Nothing is faster than light. I was grounded a lot and my dad made me read the Encyclopedias or books for punishment, plus we only had one tv for years and he watched Star Trek, Nova, Doctor Who and the like all the time, he would sit on Sundays with the tv guide and program the VCR to record these shows if they played while he wasn't home. It's too bad he died before you could get terabyte dvrs....

For a 9th grade dropout he was pretty damned smart, my mom is the same they both dropped out in 9th grade, yet you would never know