Al Gore predicts man made global warming...oops!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, sgrayatlarge <no_reply@...> wrote:
>
> (AP) GENEVA A fundamental pillar of physics that nothing can go faster
> than the speed of light appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic
> particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein's
> theories.
>
> Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked
> neutrinos traveling faster than light. That's something that according to
> Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity the famous E (equals) mc2
> equation just doesn't happen.
>
> "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be
> real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for
> Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva.
>
> Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded
> researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the
> measurements before claiming an actual discovery.
>
> "They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done
> and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere
> in the world to repeat the measurements," he said Thursday.
>
> Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such
> work immediately.
>
> "It's a shock," said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not
> part of the research in Geneva. "It's going to cause us problems, no doubt
> about that - if it's true."
>
> The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those
> came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance.
>
> Outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN's claim that the neutrinos
> one of the strangest well-known particles in physics were observed smashing
> past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers
> per second).
>
> University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it "a
> flying carpet," something that was too fantastic to be believable.
>
> 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
> enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and
> rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.
>
> "We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of
> the measurement," said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of
> Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA.
>
> The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to
> confirm the results.
>
> A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of
> running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's
> National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute
> collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment
> at CERN.
>
> Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though
> that is currently on hold after the country's devastating March 11 earthquake
> and tsunami.
>
> Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a
> fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.
>
> Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the
> speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics,"
> said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the
> experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now."
>
> He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar
> results weren't detected before, such as when an exploding star or
> supernova was observed in 1987.
>
> "This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to
> treat it extremely carefully," said Ellis.
>
