[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[salyavin808]

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 After sending the post about time travel being impossible 'cos we ain't seen 
time travellers . . . it occured to me that time travel could be theoretically 
possible but maybe it is prohibitively expensive - using up half the energy in 
the Universe, say - or maybe Our Great Leader Nathaniel Clinton (Hillary and 
Bill's great-grandson) of the New World Order has forbidden the use of such 
machines because of the dangerous implications.
 

 I was trying to work out the practicalities, assuming cost is no option. What 
you need is a spinning black hole that isn't "feeding" ie: tearing things apart 
with it's gravitational pull. This is going to be tricky for a start because 
they are effectively invisible. But the main problem is that they are all, 
luckily, a long way away. So far that it would take us millions of years to get 
there, and given that we could and the only type of time machine that's 
possible is the "closed loop" type we'd be prevented from creating cancer cure 
paradoxes by the fact that travelling back to Earth and finding the cure and 
then back to the black hole would take so long it would hardly be a feasible 
cure and the paradox wouldn't amount to much because the people we left behind 
would probably have discovered it anyway by the time we got back.
 

 But this doesn't prevent the awkwardness of the time travel paradox, if we 
take a cancer cure back then the universe we grow up in must have had the cure 
in our past thus making it difficult for someone to discover it in the future. 
Hawking gets round this by saying that travel to the past activates new 
universes via the Everett many-worlds method of new potential futures (or light 
cones) every time we try and bend ourselves back to where our time machine 
started from.
 

 Sounds a bit convenient to me, maybe there's another way round it?
 

 

 

 
 

 Also, light rays from the Battle of Hastings have been travelling into space 
since 1066. You can imagine scientists being able to refocus the rays to 
witness the scene (but crucially not being able to influence it).
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Re this story: on another site someone added a comment - "A time machine in my 
lifetime would be awesome."
 To which some wag responded: "If it happens at all it'll be in everyone's 
lifetime".
 

 Nice.
 

 Yes. Reminds me of the old physicists joke:
 

 "What do we want?"
 

 "Time travel!"
 

 "When do we want it?"
 

 "It's irrelevant!"
 

 It's a bit like those who argue that if there are aliens how come we ain't 
seen them. 
 So if there are time machines how come no one from the future pops up with a 
cure for cancer.
 

 At least aliens are possible, even if they are a bit elusive or can't be 
bothered to get out much. But is time travel? Nobody has ever demonstrated that 
your traditional TARDIS, the one we all want, is actually permitted by the laws 
of physics. But some types of time travel are possible, and one is even really 
easy.
 

 The easy one is to travel relativistically into the Earth's future. All you 
need is a spaceship that can accelerate at one Earth gravity and then you go 
for a trip round the nearest star. Time will pass slowly for you but for 
observers on Earth it will go slow. So when you get back it's thousands of 
years into the future. This time dilation prediction of Einstein's was actually 
tested as far back as the 70's with one of those supersonic spyplanes and a 
pair of atomic clocks. Not what we want as you can't go backwards, not easily 
anyway but even that's theoretically possible, with caveats.
 

 I read a book by a top physicist who'd lost his father in Vietnam and promised 
himself that if it was possible he would build a time machine and go back to 
say goodbye. So he devoted a lot of time to it even while he was gaining tenure 
and a reputation for general extreme cleverness. Working on time travel is 
career suicide in those days so he kept it quiet until he was sure he'd cracked 
it and made a presentation to the world's finest minds at a conference, and 
they agreed with him that it's possible. 
 

 Tricky though, it involves manipulating the extreme time dilation effects 
round a spinning black hole with lasers and opening a wormhole to the past and 
flying through. Because time stands still relative to an observer, and is all 
so compressed as it spins round, it's apparently possible to travel backwards 
but not beyond the time when the machine was built. So time travel may be a 
thing of the future only and you might actually get people popping back with 
cures for things. But given the difficulty of getting near enough to a black 
hole to work on it with being destroyed yourself it seems like the last thing 
anyone is going to consider a good investment. 
 

 And Stephen Hawking thinks that the 

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[s3raph...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

Re my own "scientists being able to refocus the rays to witness the scene": 

 So if any of you have ever had sex in the great outdoors your strenuous 
athletic exploits could be a YouTube viral hit in the year 3115   ;-)
 

 

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 After sending the post about time travel being impossible 'cos we ain't seen 
time travellers . . . it occured to me that time travel could be theoretically 
possible but maybe it is prohibitively expensive - using up half the energy in 
the Universe, say - or maybe Our Great Leader Nathaniel Clinton (Hillary and 
Bill's great-grandson) of the New World Order has forbidden the use of such 
machines because of the dangerous implications. 

 Also, light rays from the Battle of Hastings have been travelling into space 
since 1066. You can imagine scientists being able to refocus the rays to 
witness the scene (but crucially not being able to influence it).
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Re this story: on another site someone added a comment - "A time machine in my 
lifetime would be awesome."
 To which some wag responded: "If it happens at all it'll be in everyone's 
lifetime".
 

 Nice.
 

 Yes. Reminds me of the old physicists joke:
 

 "What do we want?"
 

 "Time travel!"
 

 "When do we want it?"
 

 "It's irrelevant!"
 

 It's a bit like those who argue that if there are aliens how come we ain't 
seen them. 
 So if there are time machines how come no one from the future pops up with a 
cure for cancer.
 

 At least aliens are possible, even if they are a bit elusive or can't be 
bothered to get out much. But is time travel? Nobody has ever demonstrated that 
your traditional TARDIS, the one we all want, is actually permitted by the laws 
of physics. But some types of time travel are possible, and one is even really 
easy.
 

 The easy one is to travel relativistically into the Earth's future. All you 
need is a spaceship that can accelerate at one Earth gravity and then you go 
for a trip round the nearest star. Time will pass slowly for you but for 
observers on Earth it will go slow. So when you get back it's thousands of 
years into the future. This time dilation prediction of Einstein's was actually 
tested as far back as the 70's with one of those supersonic spyplanes and a 
pair of atomic clocks. Not what we want as you can't go backwards, not easily 
anyway but even that's theoretically possible, with caveats.
 

 I read a book by a top physicist who'd lost his father in Vietnam and promised 
himself that if it was possible he would build a time machine and go back to 
say goodbye. So he devoted a lot of time to it even while he was gaining tenure 
and a reputation for general extreme cleverness. Working on time travel is 
career suicide in those days so he kept it quiet until he was sure he'd cracked 
it and made a presentation to the world's finest minds at a conference, and 
they agreed with him that it's possible. 
 

 Tricky though, it involves manipulating the extreme time dilation effects 
round a spinning black hole with lasers and opening a wormhole to the past and 
flying through. Because time stands still relative to an observer, and is all 
so compressed as it spins round, it's apparently possible to travel backwards 
but not beyond the time when the machine was built. So time travel may be a 
thing of the future only and you might actually get people popping back with 
cures for things. But given the difficulty of getting near enough to a black 
hole to work on it with being destroyed yourself it seems like the last thing 
anyone is going to consider a good investment. 
 

 And Stephen Hawking thinks that the wormholes would collapse as soon as you 
entered them anyway, so it looks like history will continue to be just one damn 
thing after another...
 

 

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[s3raph...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

After sending the post about time travel being impossible 'cos we ain't seen 
time travellers . . . it occured to me that time travel could be theoretically 
possible but maybe it is prohibitively expensive - using up half the energy in 
the Universe, say - or maybe Our Great Leader Nathaniel Clinton (Hillary and 
Bill's great-grandson) of the New World Order has forbidden the use of such 
machines because of the dangerous implications. 

 Also, light rays from the Battle of Hastings have been travelling into space 
since 1066. You can imagine scientists being able to refocus the rays to 
witness the scene (but crucially not being able to influence it).
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Re this story: on another site someone added a comment - "A time machine in my 
lifetime would be awesome."
 To which some wag responded: "If it happens at all it'll be in everyone's 
lifetime".
 

 Nice.
 

 Yes. Reminds me of the old physicists joke:
 

 "What do we want?"
 

 "Time travel!"
 

 "When do we want it?"
 

 "It's irrelevant!"
 

 It's a bit like those who argue that if there are aliens how come we ain't 
seen them. 
 So if there are time machines how come no one from the future pops up with a 
cure for cancer.
 

 At least aliens are possible, even if they are a bit elusive or can't be 
bothered to get out much. But is time travel? Nobody has ever demonstrated that 
your traditional TARDIS, the one we all want, is actually permitted by the laws 
of physics. But some types of time travel are possible, and one is even really 
easy.
 

 The easy one is to travel relativistically into the Earth's future. All you 
need is a spaceship that can accelerate at one Earth gravity and then you go 
for a trip round the nearest star. Time will pass slowly for you but for 
observers on Earth it will go slow. So when you get back it's thousands of 
years into the future. This time dilation prediction of Einstein's was actually 
tested as far back as the 70's with one of those supersonic spyplanes and a 
pair of atomic clocks. Not what we want as you can't go backwards, not easily 
anyway but even that's theoretically possible, with caveats.
 

 I read a book by a top physicist who'd lost his father in Vietnam and promised 
himself that if it was possible he would build a time machine and go back to 
say goodbye. So he devoted a lot of time to it even while he was gaining tenure 
and a reputation for general extreme cleverness. Working on time travel is 
career suicide in those days so he kept it quiet until he was sure he'd cracked 
it and made a presentation to the world's finest minds at a conference, and 
they agreed with him that it's possible. 
 

 Tricky though, it involves manipulating the extreme time dilation effects 
round a spinning black hole with lasers and opening a wormhole to the past and 
flying through. Because time stands still relative to an observer, and is all 
so compressed as it spins round, it's apparently possible to travel backwards 
but not beyond the time when the machine was built. So time travel may be a 
thing of the future only and you might actually get people popping back with 
cures for things. But given the difficulty of getting near enough to a black 
hole to work on it with being destroyed yourself it seems like the last thing 
anyone is going to consider a good investment. 
 

 And Stephen Hawking thinks that the wormholes would collapse as soon as you 
entered them anyway, so it looks like history will continue to be just one damn 
thing after another...
 

 

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[s3raph...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

Re this story: on another site someone added a comment - "A time machine in my 
lifetime would be awesome."
 To which some wag responded: "If it happens at all it'll be in everyone's 
lifetime".
 

 Nice.
 

 It's a bit like those who argue that if there are aliens how come we ain't 
seen them. 
 So if there are time machines how come no one from the future pops up with a 
cure for cancer.

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[s3raph...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

Re "The inflation of the Universe /Empty space can travel faster than light":
 

 Neither of those phenomena contradict Einstein - space is not "stuff".
 

 Re "Electrons in quantum entanglement can simultaneously act together even 
when they're trillions of miles away":
 

 Scientists seem to agree that quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit 
signals instantaneously (or faster than light) for reasons which escape me.
 

 Re "I believe those scientists in Italy [were] proven wrong in their 
experiments about a year ago?":
 

 They were indeed. But I guess that has made them extra cautious!
 

 Re Sal's "fundamental contradictions could happen" :
 

 No they can't. 
 

 Which is why my time-travel thought experiment shows that time-travel is 
impossible. 
 

 Impossible *within* the same Universe. You might - just possibly - be able to 
travel back to a perfect copy of medieval London but what happens from that 
point on would be happening in a parallel world.
 

 

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Salyavin and S3,
 

 About a week ago, I posted a few phenomena that seemingly exceed the speed of 
light.  These are:
 

 1.  The inflation of the universe milliseconds after the Big Bang.
 

 2.  Empty space can travel faster than light because it has no mass.
 

 3.  Electrons in quantum entanglement can simultaneously act together even 
when they're trillions of miles away.
 

 I believe those scientists in Italy are blinded by their aspirations to make a 
name for themselves.  That's why they're erroneously concluding that neutrinos 
travel faster than light.  Weren't they proven wrong in their experiments about 
a year ago?

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[awoelfleba...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Re this story: on another site someone added a comment - "A time machine in my 
lifetime would be awesome."
 To which some wag responded: "If it happens at all it'll be in everyone's 
lifetime".
 

 Nice.
 

 It's a bit like those who argue that if there are aliens how come we ain't 
seen them. 
 So if there are time machines how come no one from the future pops up with a 
cure for cancer.
 

 Or pops up at all, let alone with a cure.

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[he...@hotmail.com [FairfieldLife]]

Well: pariNaama-traya-saMyamaad atiitaanaagatajñaanam! (YS III 16) 

 
 

 

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[salyavin808]

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Re "Faster than light they must be relativistically moving backwards in time.":
 

 This stuff is beyond my pay grade but I understand that talk of backwards time 
travel is based on the "light cone" - zones in our past are "now" outside the 
ability of a light signal to reach us (see below).
 

 However, if neutrinos can exceed light speed then maybe that just means the 
angle at the cone's tip should be larger . . ?
 

 If that is not the case and neutrinos can send signals back into the past then 
ponder this:
 

 A mad scientist sets up an experiment in which a neutrino beam sends a signal 
into the past (say one second before). If a receiver picks up the signal sent 
from one second in the future it immediately shuts down the transmitter so 
ensuring that no signal will ever be sent.
 

 Mindfcuk.
 

 A contradiction. 
 

 A contradiction in *reality*!
 

 That's the funny thing about the "sum over histories" interpretation of 
quantum theory, we could do a Shrodinger's cat type experiment that has two 
outcomes in the same universe. This must mean that it's possible - to use 
Feynman's analogy - that you could apply for a job and both get it and not get 
it as all particles behave in an entangled way. So it's possible that you could 
meet someone who remembers you getting the job when you didn't get it. The 
chances of that are rather small though, hard to imagine a less likely bet but 
apparently it's possible so fundamental contradictions could happen. 
 

 Reality may be - but most likely isn't - a lot stranger than we suppose. As 
Douglas Adams observed, if the universe ground to a halt because one bit of it 
looked at another bit and said "That doesn't make sense" it would have got past 
the first nanosecond...
 

 I'm not sure if you could ever do such an experiment with a neutrino as the 
start travelling faster than light, this must make them slippery customers in 
an experimental sense because they are long gone before you switch on the 
measurement device - or even think of it if they are far enough away - but 
doesn't the principle of wave like duality means that if you did a double-slit 
experiment with them you'd end up without a counter-intuitive interference 
pattern?
 

 One rationalisation of the interference problem states that the everything in 
the subatomic world moves backwards in time thus solving the problem, but that 
adds another level of explanation as to why we appear to be moving forwards so 
I suspect we can ditch that idea.
 

 Help! The manifold of space-time is starting to unravel.
 

 I think that's just my brain...In an infinite universe, anything permitted by 
the laws of physics has already happened an infinite number of times. 
 

 Is anyone out there?
 

 The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking for other Earth type planets and 
the spread of dense matter when compared to the amount of devastating 
supernovae in the early universe means that ours might be one of the first 
planets capable of bearing life as we know it. This is a good solution to the 
Fermi paradox - that we must be alone because no aliens have visited us yet - 
they simply haven't evolved beyond the level we have.
 

 The team estimate there are possibly a trillion Earth type worlds in the 
galaxy though. Do all of them ponder the same sort of things in the same sort 
of way, or is it possible our maths and way of constructing our experiments 
limit our understanding by pushing us into a cone of ever decreasing 
explanations we are doomed to call reality thus missing the bigger picture 
altogether?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than 
light.
 Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said 
that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near 
Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light 
would have done. 

 "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for 
anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he 
said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

 
 If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of 
special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" 
and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

 

 That's interesting, as are neutrinos themselves. If I recall correctly, they 
are forged as a byproduct of nuclear fusion inside stars,  the first odd thing 
about them is that they start travelling faster than light speed so they 
side-step the problem with acceleration. They are also massless which means 
they avoid having infinite mass - having none to start with - this also helps 
avoid destroying the 

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[salyavin808]

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Re this story: on another site someone added a comment - "A time machine in my 
lifetime would be awesome."
 To which some wag responded: "If it happens at all it'll be in everyone's 
lifetime".
 

 Nice.
 

 Yes. Reminds me of the old physicists joke:
 

 "What do we want?"
 

 "Time travel!"
 

 "When do we want it?"
 

 "It's irrelevant!"
 

 It's a bit like those who argue that if there are aliens how come we ain't 
seen them. 
 So if there are time machines how come no one from the future pops up with a 
cure for cancer.
 

 At least aliens are possible, even if they are a bit elusive or can't be 
bothered to get out much. But is time travel? Nobody has ever demonstrated that 
your traditional TARDIS, the one we all want, is actually permitted by the laws 
of physics. But some types of time travel are possible, and one is even really 
easy.
 

 The easy one is to travel relativistically into the Earth's future. All you 
need is a spaceship that can accelerate at one Earth gravity and then you go 
for a trip round the nearest star. Time will pass slowly for you but for 
observers on Earth it will go slow. So when you get back it's thousands of 
years into the future. This time dilation prediction of Einstein's was actually 
tested as far back as the 70's with one of those supersonic spyplanes and a 
pair of atomic clocks. Not what we want as you can't go backwards, not easily 
anyway but even that's theoretically possible, with caveats.
 

 I read a book by a top physicist who'd lost his father in Vietnam and promised 
himself that if it was possible he would build a time machine and go back to 
say goodbye. So he devoted a lot of time to it even while he was gaining tenure 
and a reputation for general extreme cleverness. Working on time travel is 
career suicide in those days so he kept it quiet until he was sure he'd cracked 
it and made a presentation to the world's finest minds at a conference, and 
they agreed with him that it's possible. 
 

 Tricky though, it involves manipulating the extreme time dilation effects 
round a spinning black hole with lasers and opening a wormhole to the past and 
flying through. Because time stands still relative to an observer, and is all 
so compressed as it spins round, it's apparently possible to travel backwards 
but not beyond the time when the machine was built. So time travel may be a 
thing of the future only and you might actually get people popping back with 
cures for things. But given the difficulty of getting near enough to a black 
hole to work on it with being destroyed yourself it seems like the last thing 
anyone is going to consider a good investment. 
 

 And Stephen Hawking thinks that the wormholes would collapse as soon as you 
entered them anyway, so it looks like history will continue to be just one damn 
thing after another...
 

 

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[jr_...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

Salyavin and S3,
 

 About a week ago, I posted a few phenomena that seemingly exceed the speed of 
light.  These are:
 

 1.  The inflation of the universe milliseconds after the Big Bang.
 

 2.  Empty space can travel faster than light because it has no mass.
 

 3.  Electrons in quantum entanglement can simultaneously act together even 
when they're trillions of miles away.
 

 I believe those scientists in Italy are blinded by their aspirations to make a 
name for themselves.  That's why they're erroneously concluding that neutrinos 
travel faster than light.  Weren't they proven wrong in their experiments about 
a year ago?

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[s3raph...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

Re "Faster than light they must be relativistically moving backwards in time.":
 

 This stuff is beyond my pay grade but I understand that talk of backwards time 
travel is based on the "light cone" - zones in our past are "now" outside the 
ability of a light signal to reach us (see below).
 

 However, if neutrinos can exceed light speed then maybe that just means the 
angle at the cone's tip should be larger . . ?
 

 If that is not the case and neutrinos can send signals back into the past then 
ponder this:
 

 A mad scientist sets up an experiment in which a neutrino beam sends a signal 
into the past (say one second before). If a receiver picks up the signal sent 
from one second in the future it immediately shuts down the transmitter so 
ensuring that no signal will ever be sent.
 

 Mindfcuk.
 

 A contradiction. 
 

 A contradiction in *reality*!
 

 Help! The manifold of space-time is starting to unravel.
 

 Is anyone out there?
 

 

 

 

 

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than 
light.
 Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said 
that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near 
Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light 
would have done. 

 "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for 
anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he 
said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

 
 If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of 
special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" 
and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

 

 That's interesting, as are neutrinos themselves. If I recall correctly, they 
are forged as a byproduct of nuclear fusion inside stars,  the first odd thing 
about them is that they start travelling faster than light speed so they 
side-step the problem with acceleration. They are also massless which means 
they avoid having infinite mass - having none to start with - this also helps 
avoid destroying the universe as there are rather a lot of them. A few billion 
neutrinos from the sun pass through every square inch of your skin every second.
 

 Perhaps the most interesting thing about them is that if they really are 
travelling faster than light they must be relativistically moving backwards in 
time. This is because time slows down for the observer as you get close to 
light speed and stops when you reach it (not that you can) but anything going 
faster is - compared to our time frame - going backwards.
 

 This has been used as a plot device in hard sci-fi for decades, astrophysicist 
Gregory Benford wrote his Timescape novel featuring communication from the 
future via neutrino beams, as did John Carpenter in his movie Prince of 
Darkness (it was far and away the best bit of the film)..

 

 So the question is, how come these guys at CERN didn't know this? Do they not 
read sci-fi or was Benford's book transmitted back through time as a publicity 
stunt? Perhaps it was pure theory until now and they are justifiably excited in 
being able to prove it?
 

 Interesting stuff, but Einstein is safe, for now

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[dhamiltony...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

Om, weren't Einstein the one who discovered that mass times the speed of light 
squared equals $, ? Money.  It explains a lot and seems unchanged with this.
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than 
light.
 Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said 
that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near 
Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light 
would have done. 

 "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for 
anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he 
said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

 
 If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of 
special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" 
and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

 

[FairfieldLife] Re: Einstein - close but no cigar

[salyavin808]

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,  wrote :

 Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than 
light.
 Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said 
that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near 
Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light 
would have done. 

 "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for 
anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he 
said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

 
 If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of 
special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" 
and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

 

 That's interesting, as are neutrinos themselves. If I recall correctly, they 
are forged as a byproduct of nuclear fusion inside stars,  the first odd thing 
about them is that they start travelling faster than light speed so they 
side-step the problem with acceleration. They are also massless which means 
they avoid having infinite mass - having none to start with - this also helps 
avoid destroying the universe as there are rather a lot of them. A few billion 
neutrinos from the sun pass through every square inch of your skin every second.
 

 Perhaps the most interesting thing about them is that if they really are 
travelling faster than light they must be relativistically moving backwards in 
time. This is because time slows down for the observer as you get close to 
light speed and stops when you reach it (not that you can) but anything going 
faster is - compared to our time frame - going backwards.
 

 This has been used as a plot device in hard sci-fi for decades, astrophysicist 
Gregory Benford wrote his Timescape novel featuring communication from the 
future via neutrino beams, as did John Carpenter in his movie Prince of 
Darkness (it was far and away the best bit of the film)..

 

 So the question is, how come these guys at CERN didn't know this? Do they not 
read sci-fi or was Benford's book transmitted back through time as a publicity 
stunt? Perhaps it was pure theory until now and they are justifiably excited in 
being able to prove it?
 

 Interesting stuff, but Einstein is safe, for now