Wednesday, September 28, 2011

First post!

I'm sure everyone has read about the neutrinos that supposedly traveled faster than the speed of light: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/27/scitech/main20112364.shtml. (There are so many articles on the subject, this is just currently the first Google result. But all the articles say basically the same thing - physics is broken, Einstein was wrong, etc).

I heard about this first from my sister, who texted me late at night to let me know about the MSN article she had read. I was interested to see what Caltech scientists would think about it, but it seems that most people are ignoring it. Probably because we all (me included) assume that there was some sort of experimental error involved in this "finding." No one that I have talked to seems
to actually consider what the repercussions would be if this finding were true.

Forgive this truncated blog post (we have class in 12 minutes, and Cahill is pretty far so I better start walking!) but I would love to know what you guys think about this. We are going to be super-affected if this is true, astronomers and physicists that we are, but would it be good or bad for our scientific careers? Can we just pretend that it were true that the speed of light barrier were broken - how would it change physics?