We "know" that the current Big Bang theory says that the origins of the Universe is approximately around 13 billion years ago or so. My question is : According to whose time? (since there is no universal time according to Special and General Relativity).
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Followup: FTL neutrinos explained? Not so fast, folks. | Bad Astronomy
If you haven’t heard about the experiment that apparently showed that subatomic particles called neutrinos might move faster than light (what we in the know call FTL, to make us look cooler), then I assume this is your first time on the internet. If that’s the case, then you can read my writeup on what happened.
Basically, neutrinos move very very fast, almost at the speed of light. Some scientists created neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, and then measured how long it took them to reach a detector called OPERA, located in Italy. When they did the math, it looked like the neutrinos actually got there by traveling a hair faster than the speed of light! 60 nanoseconds faster, to be accurate.
Was relativity doomed?
Nope. In fact, relativity may very well be what saves the day here.
First, most scientists were skeptical. Even the people running the experiment were skeptical, and were basically asking everyone else for help. They figured they might have made a mistake as well, and couldn’t figure out what had happened. Relativity is an extremely well-tested theory, and doesn’t (easily) allow for FTL. Despite some headlines screaming that Einstein might be wrong, most everyone figured the problem lay elsewhere.
Most everyone zeroed in on the timing of the experiment, which has to be extremely accurate. The entire flight time of a neutrino from Switzerland to Italy is only about 2.4 milliseconds, and the measurement accuracy needs to be to only a few nanoseconds — mind you, a nanosecond is a billionth of a second!
The scientists used a very sophisticated GPS setup to determine the timing, so that has been the focus of a lot of scrutiny as well. And a new paper just posted on the Physics Preprint Archive may have the answer… and it uses relativity.
Basically, what Einstein found is that the speed of light is the same for all observers. If I’m moving at 0.9 times the speed of light toward you and turn on my flashlight, I see those photons moving away from me at the speed of light. The thing is, you see those photons moving toward you at the speed of light! This goes against common sense, which tells us that velocities add together; if I throw a baseball out car window, the velocity of the ball add to that of the car.
But light doesn’t behave that way. And this changes a lot of things, including how two objects moving relative to each other measure distance, and even how they measure time. I might measure a meter stick in my hand as being (duh) one meter long, but an observer moving past me at a significant fraction of the speed of light would see it being shorter. It’s just a consequence of the Universe making sure we all see the same speed of light.
And that’s where neutrinos come in. In this new paper, author Ronald A.J. van Elburg lays out his case. The timing was measured using a GPS satellite orbiting the Earth, and moving relative to CERN and OPERA. That means the distance traveled by the neutrinos would be less as measured by the GPS sat as it would be from the ground, and therefore wouldn’t take as long to cover it. Doing the detailed math, van Elburg calculates how much faster the neutrinos would be expected to arrive accounting for the satellite’s motion, and he gets… 64 nanoseconds. That’s almost exactly the discrepancy measured by the original experimenters.
Case closed!
Well, maybe. As I recall from the foofooraw that unfolded after the initial announcement, the original experimenters said they accounted for all relativistic effects. The paper they published, however, didn’t include the details of how they did this, so it’s not clear what they included and what they might have left out. It’s possible van Elburg might be right, but I expect we haven’t seen the end of this. After all, not long after the announcement, a physicist asked if they had accounted for gravitational time dilation — like relative velocity, gravity can also affect the flow of time, throwing off the measurement — and the experimenters said they had.
I had thought of something like this as well. CERN and OPERA are at different latitudes, and since the Earth rotates, they are moving around the Earth’s axis at different speeds. Could that be it? I did the math, and the answer is no. Too bad; it would’ve been fun to be the person to have figured this out!
The bottom line here is that this experiment is still very interesting. I don’t think we know exactly what’s going on here yet — my bet is still on the statistics, since they didn’t measure the speeds of individual neutrinos, but clouds of them, making the exact timing much harder — but it’s hard to say. Like most other scientists, I think somewhere down the line here a mistake was made, and the neutrinos, like everything else we know of made of matter, travel slower than light. But if we’re wrong, then we get new physics, which is great! And if we’re right and figure out how, it means that future experiments will benefit from this. Win/win.
Either way, my bet is that we’re not done here. This new result is interesting and may very well be right, and be the dampening field that bursts the neutrino FTL warp bubble. But I’ll wait for the reaction from the original experimenters to see what they say. If we’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s that it’s best not to jump to conclusions.
Related posts:
- Faster-than-light travel discovered? Slow down, folks
- A (very) smart kid and a solid theory
- Wall Street Journal: neutrinos show climate change isn’t real
- Followup on the WSJ climate denial OpEd
Liquid Chalk: Spiderman Grip Minus the Teenage Superhero Angst [Sports]
You don't have to be hanging from the side of a mountain, or battling evildoers on the rooftops of Manhattan, to appreciate a little extra grip. The future of your NBA career, or just avoiding the blooper reels, could hinge on catching a vital pass during the playoffs. More »
Blue is the Colour
The Richard's Pipit takes flight once again (Jamie Coleman)
Hey there Mr Blue... (Jamie Coleman)
Bluethroat shows well on Brownsman (Graeme Duncan)
Saturday 15th October comments: The Farnes never fails to disappoint! After the jubilation of yesterday’s Richard’s Pipit, the team were yet again jumping for joy after the discovery of another Farnes speciality: a Bluethroat! A stunning bird was found in the morning on Brownsman, briefly showing well but becoming very elusive at times! The Farnes has become one of the best places in Britain to see this Scandinavian stunner, especially during the autumn as of later years; today’s sighting marking the sixth consecutive year in which it has been recorded.
Inner Farne’s Richard’s Pipit was spotted briefly again today, sticking close to the species’ famously annoying behaviour of refusing to perch or pose on the ground for cameras.
With just a few other common migrants, these two birds really were the star of the show. The warden team are hoping that one or two more surprises will appear shortly to add to the birding bonanza that is the Farne Islands.
Who Knew a Decomposing Whale Could be so Beautiful? [Video]
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Charting Virgin’s customer growth
In a press release Thursday about NASA’s purchase of a SpaceShipTwo flight for research activities, Virgin Galactic provided an update on sales for its primary market, space tourism. “Virgin Galactic has already collected more than $58 million in deposits from 455 future tourist astronauts,” the release noted. Those are the largest figures that the company has cited for both customers and deposits to date. But how has its backlog grown in recent years?
To try to answer this, I dug through several years of my own notes as well as media reports and press releases. The result is the chart below, showing the number of customers Virgin Galactic has reported since the beginning of 2008:
It’s worth noting that in many cases the numbers given by the company are approximate: “nearly 300″, “over 350″, etc. For the purposes of the chart I’ve rounded up or down accordingly; in the case of the previous examples, they would be 300 and 350, respectively, in the chart. (Ideally I’d put in some error bars, but Google doesn’t support them in this chart.)
What this shows is that after a relatively flat 2009, Virgin has seen a steady increase in customers. (2009, it should be noted, is not as flat as the chart suggests, because of the rounding described above: the company reported “nearly 300″ in early 2009 and “over 300″ late in the year.) Over the last 17 months, from mid-May 2010 to Thursday, the company had seen an increase of 120 customers, a rate of a new customer every 4.3 days. During the nearly 22 months prior to that, from late July 2008 to mid-May 2010, the company had reported an increase of only 65 new customers, or one every 10.1 days. The sluggish growth then is not surprising given the economic crisis that started in 2008. Meanwhile, as the economy slowly improves Virgin is inching closer to flight, which may increase the interest among prospective customers.
This data set is certainly incomplete, based on a limited amount of research. If you’re aware of new or more accurate data, please let me know and I’ll update this chart accordingly.
Samples
What I'd like is contact information for styrene butadiene rubber samples in sheets or pellets for testing and development of product. Any contact that would provide this information would be appreciated.
Thank you,
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Apple Purposely Gave Siri Some Attitude [IPhone]
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The WISPR Vaporizer Looks Like a Retro Transistor Radio [Smoking]
210 MW KWU Design Governing System
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what are benfits of reforestation
is any project which good for reforestation. and is good for environment
Try This One
UPDATE: Solved by Andy at 12:04 CDT
Can you believe it’s already Saturday again? It’s been hectic around here, and I’m just happy to be here with another riddle for you.
Speaking of which, today’s riddle is ready for your delectation. A bit different, today’s riddle can be viewed as science fiction, or as science fact. Ready?
I've always liked this image
There’s been a lot of speculation given to this over the years.
As an event, this may have already happened.
As a science fiction plot device, you won’t get very far, very fast (so to speak), if it hasn’t happened somewhere along your story line.
NASA - one of the archive images... Apollo 11, and that's Buzz Aldrin
Generally considered to be benign, there are very reputable scientists who argue strongly against further experiments or attempts to facilitate this.
We’ve had many discussions on the blog about whether or not this is possible.
This riddle answer has a very strong presence in science fiction…
H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" original cover - I still think those brains with their blank eyes are creepy
… in fact, we really wouldn’t have much in the genre without is.
Done and done. There’s a nice little riddle to distract you from your regular Saturday round. Oh! Before I forget; if you want to solve the riddle, but already have several “wins” on this riddle cycle and so want to leave the riddle open for someone else to solve, you are welcome to email your guess to me. If you solve it, I’ll let everybody know, and the riddle will remain open.
Another rerun, but this image tickles me (and it's all about ME, right?)
Reforestation
what do you mean by reforestation
Lower Latency: Neutrino Network?
SoftLayer is on the “bleeding edge” of technology, and that’s right where I’m comfortable. I love being a part of something new and relevant. I also love science fiction and find that it’s mixing together with reality more and more these days. Yay for me and my nerdyness! Beam me up Luke Skywalker! (I wonder how many nerds cringed at that statement!)
In a recent post from New Scientist, a test showed neutrino particles being clocked faster than the speed of light, and a dimension-hop might be the reason. Rather than go into the nerdy parts of the article that I’m sure you read before continuing to this sentence, I want to compare how SoftLayer would use this to our (and more importantly our customers’) advantage: A neutrino network! We could have the fastest network in the world, and we could use the technology for faster motherboards and components too. Because that’s how we roll.
Enter science fiction. Let’s say neutrinos were indeed using another dimension to travel. Like, say, the 8th dimension as referred to in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.” This dimension also happens to be a prison used by the Lectroids of Planet 10 to store criminals. Go figure, right? Obstacles always come up, so if our neutrino network was targeted by those Lectroids, Dody Lira and the abuse team would have no problems taking them down … After all, Lectroid’s fiddling with data can be bad for business (Not to mention the possibility of Lectroid’s using our network to come back to this dimension, wreak havoc, and eat all our junk food). Dody would have to upgrade some of the tools his team uses, like a Jet Car with an “Oscillation Overthruster” (which looks eerily similar to the Flux Capacitor) to travel in and out of the 8th dimension to hunt down those pesky Lectroids that won’t comply.
Then, after Dody and crew wrangle the Lectroids (as I’m sure they would), we could offer the Lectroids email and Internet service. Bam! More customers on top of a supernatural network!
Coming back to reality (a bit), we have an interesting world ahead of us. Technologies we have only seen in movies and some we haven’t even imagined yet are becoming reality! If they fall into the usable realm of SoftLayer, you can bet we’ll be one of the first to share them with the world. But not before we get all the bugs (and Lectroids) out.
-Brad