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?
Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. John JohnsonSeptember 28, 2011 at 3:34 PM

    If true, rather than proving physics to be broken it would prove that science works and works well. Long-held beliefs can still tumble in the face of experimental evidence. Truths are always pending, awaiting further verification. If everything that is "known" remained unchanged, science would be pretty boring.

    As another perspective: http://xkcd.com/955/

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 1, 2011 at 5:53 AM

    I've been wondering about this also. I like Professor Johnson's comment. As a non-scientist (I'm a librarian), I like to read things at a lay-person's level. I've just started reading Lisa Randall's new book, "Knocking on Heaven's Door." She has me wondering if, even if further verified, at what scale and how extensively physics would actually be shaken up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Juliette BeckerOctober 3, 2011 at 11:54 AM

    At first, I thought EVERYTHING would change, since so many relationships depend on the value of c (speed of light).

    However, I realized that just because something travels faster than the speed of light doesn't mean c would change! (Slight oversight on my part...) It is easy to think of physical changes if something could travel faster than c. If you could send a particle (perhaps a message...) faster than the speed of light, couldn't it technically travel back in time? Or would the scale be so small that nothing practical would ever come of it?

    I think it's good to question what we know every now and then, as getting complacent isn't good for science!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)