Was Einstein Wrong?

[Dave (imported)]

one of the things that all physicists face is that Einsteinian mechanics, newtonian mechanics, and quantum mechanics do not explain everything and do not fit together comfortably. There are big gaps in the fit and all physicists know it. Thus they all know that eventually some other system explaining all matter and energy and space and time will exist.

That's the nature of it. Theoretical physics will change as they continue to make discoveries and find all the holes.

Will we ever know it all?

Maybe. but remember, we don't know what "dark matter" is and when we start to figure it out, there might be three, four, five or more theories of "dark matter" before they figure it out.

It's a wonderful system we have -- lt seems to work! Good! We'll us it until it doesn't work.

[moi621 (imported)]

After our last discussion of "dark matter"

I prefer "unfound matter" rather then indicate it is somehow unusual like anti matter.

Why not call it Black matter?

PC Brigade Moi

Demonstrate a neutrino's mass increases as it approaches the speed of light!

I propose the neutrino is "different".

At the moment or light speed, able to "blip" though space-time.

Maybe to reappear in another part of Moi's universe. (I dibbed it first.)

The Quantum gang has "broadcast", like "beaming" an atomic particle I believe.

Moi

[Slammr (imported)]

...

Demonstrate a neutrino's mass increases as it approaches the speed of light! ...

Moi

The formula is:

m = mo * / SQR( 1 - v^2/c^2)

where "m" = mass at velocity "v"

"mo" = rest mass of the particle.

If a body is moving at the speed of light, then v = c

and it's mass m = mo * / SQR(1 - c^2/c^2)

m = mo * / SQR (1 - 1)

m = mo * / SQR(0)

So m = mo / 0 = infinity

"m" is infinite - the body will have infinite mass if it travels at

the speed of light in a vacuum..

It will also have infinite energy and momentum.

These concepts are not acceptable, therefore any

body with mass cannot travel at the speed light has in a vacuum.

"Faster than light" particles may be physics revolution Robert Evans, Reuters September 24, 2011, 1:31 am

[/URL] (http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F ... cles%20may %20be%20physics%20revolution%20-%20Yahoo%217&via=Y7News&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fau.news.yahoo.com%2Fa%2F-%2Ftechnology%2F10330338%2Ffaster-than-light-particles-may-be-physics-revolution%2F&lang=en)

GENEVA (Reuters) - Leading scientists said on Friday the discovery of sub-atomic particles apparently traveling faster than light could force a major rethink of theories on the makeup of the cosmos if independently confirmed.

Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics at Britain's Manchester University, told Reuters the results if confirmed would mean it would be possible in theory to "send information into the past." "In other words, time travel into the past would become possible...(though) that does not mean we'll be building time-machines anytime soon."

The CERN research institute near Geneva said measurements over three years had shown neutrinos pumped to a receiver in Gran Sasso, Italy, had arrived an average of 60 nanoseconds sooner than light would have done -- a tiny difference that could nonetheless undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is an extraordinary claim," eminent cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees told Reuters.

"It is premature to comment on this," Professor Stephen Hawking, the world's most well-known physicist, told Reuters. "Further experiments and clarifications are needed."

Professor Jenny Thomas, who works on neutrinos at CERN's friendly rival Fermilab near Chicago in the United States, commented: "The impact of this measurement, were it to be correct, would be huge."

CERN's own research director Sergio Bertolucci said if the findings were confirmed -- and at least two separate laboratories are likely to start work on this in the near future -- "it might change our view of physics."

The high level of caution is normal in science where anything that could be a breakthrough discovery, especially overturning well-established thinking, is in principle always checked and rechecked by other researchers.

In a comment issued by CERN, the world's leading laboratory for particle research on the edge of Geneva, Bertolucci underscored this principle.

"When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artifact of the measurement to account for it, it is normal to invite broader scrutiny....it is good scientific practice," he said.

The measurements were posted on the scientific website [URL]http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

overnight.

The discovery would open up intriguing theoretical possibilities.

"Light speed is a cosmic speed limit and it exists in order to protect the law of cause and effect," said Professor Forshaw.

"If something travels faster than the cosmic speed limit, then it becomes possible to send information into the past - in other words, time travel into the past would become possible. That does not mean we'll be building time-machines anytime soon though - there is quite a gulf between a time-traveling neutrino to a time-traveling human."

GHOST PARTICLES

The CERN team, working in an experiment dubbed OPERA, pumped neutrinos -- often called ghost particles because they pass through matter, and human bodies, unnoticed -- from CERN 730 kms (500 miles) to Gran Sasso south of Rome.

Over three years, and from 15,000 neutrino "events," a huge detector at the Italian center deep under mountain rock recorded what OPERA spokesman Antonio Ereditato described as the "startling" findings.

He said his team had high confidence they had measured correctly and excluded any possibility of some outside influence, or artifact, affecting the outcome.

"My dream is now that other colleagues find we are right," he added.

In Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which underpins the current view of how the universe works,

nothing can travel faster than

light -- 300,000 kms, or 186,000 miles, per second -- because its mass would become impossibly infinite.

Einstein's theory has been tested thousands of times over the past 106 years and only recently have there been just slight hints that the behavior of some elementary particles of matter might not fit into it.

These hints were detected last year in Fermilab's MINOS experiment with neutrinos, but -- unlike those of OPERA -- were found to be within a normal margin of error.

Fermilab's Thomas, who is likely to be involved in MINOS experiments to check the CERN-Gran Sasso measurements, said if they were correct "it would overturn everything we thought we understood about relativity and the speed of light."

Ereditato, a physicist who also works at the Einstein Institute in the University of Berne, said the potential impact on science "is too large to draw any immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations."

SURPRISING WITH MYSTERIES

Also declining to claim a genuine scientific discovery before other researchers had confirmed them, he said the neutrino, whose existence was first confirmed in 1934, "is still surprising us with its mysteries."

Scientific bloggers on the Internet said the particle might be slipping into and out of dimensions, other than the known four of length, breadth, depth and time, as predicted by the controversial "string theory" of how the cosmos works.

"Only when the dust finally settles should we dare draw any firm conclusions," said Professor Forshaw. "It is in the nature of science that for every new and important discovery there will be hundreds of false alarms."

(Additional reporting by John Manley and Steve Addison)

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/technology ... evolution/

[moi621 (imported)]

Sorry. I meant by observation, not mathematics.

Figures and figurers don't y'know.

for the good upload.

[janekane (imported)]

If it is not unduly improper, there are, methinks, unresolved foundational issues in the philosophy of science. One such is whether a mathematical model of an observed physical phenomenon partly results from the phenomenon being observed having been altered by the process of observation. What about the basis principle of observation: "It is impossible to observe anything without changing it."

The pity is, if an observation did not happen, it did not change what was not observed?

Many folks have read and studied the work of Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Kuhn, to name a few folks who have put effort into making sense of science. Some of the notions within Feyerabend's "Against Method," may illumine some aspects of the neutrino "measurement anomaly." Are the mathematics of, for example, relativity, anything more than a correlation study between the physically observable "world" and the "world" of mathematics as an abstraction of observations? If so, the physical world complies with the mathematical models only to the extent that the mathematical models accurately model the physical world. It may be perilous at times to equivalence the model of something with the something modeled.

Analytical reductionism as the only way of science may seriously limit the realm of scientific inquiry. Is an observably unbroken something made of the parts into which it can observably be broken? Is the keyboard which I am using for typing these words made of atoms or matter waves? My answer is, "No," or, "Yes," depending on the meaning of "made of." If it is made of atoms, it is no less made of matter waves (de Broglie waves).

Consider the ancient notion of the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire. Well, there is a correspondence between the elements of that notion and the four observed states of "ordinary matter": Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Based on that, the "earth, water, air, fire" model is not wrong, but is merely one way to define what is elementary.

What if neutrinos are observable tachyons?

Or, is imagination on fire a form of plasma?

[Cainanite (imported)]

The math of it is quite beyond me, but I can understand the concept. It makes sense to me, even if I can't quantify it mathematically. My hat is off to all those in this thread that get the math.

I'll talk concepts instead. Someone else can come in with the math if they like.

The Higgs Bosun particle is the quantum particle everyone is looking for. It is the particle responsible for mass in the sub atomic scale. That little bugger has been hard to pin down. Every time someone looks to find it, it ain't there. Some scientists are questioning if it is even an observable particle at all. As janekane said, things change simply from observation. It is like the universe's greatest hide and seek champion. The Higgs Bosun could also not be a particle at all, but instead be a wave, or extra-dimensional effect of combining other particles. Weird, huh?

The way I imagine it working with Einstein's theory (and I know I'm wrong, but bear with me.) is this. As a particle

approaches the speed of light,

it picks up more and more Higgs Bosun particles. Kind of like a snow plow pushing through snow. At a certain point, the particle collects more Higgs Bosun particles than it has energy to move. As the snow plow builds up more and more snow in front of it, it eventually can't move, because the snow outweighs the plow. Even a plow with near infinite energy, would eventually be forced to stop, when the weight of the snow is greater than the energy to move it. Hence, a particle can't move

faster than the speed of light,

because it would need infinite energy to do so. ( This analogy doesn't really work because you can't connect General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics - Just play along with me though. It is a thought experiment - kind-of.)

Perhaps the neutrino has a property that allows it to part Higgs Bosun particles, instead of them building up in front. Maybe to keep using the snow-plow analogy, it is a wedge shaped plow, instead of a shovel shaped plow. It is still affected by the imposed mass of the Higgs Bosun, as a wedge shaped plow would still encounter resistance from parting the snow. It just encounters less resistance than if it were a shovel shaped plow.

What I am in effect saying is that perhaps the neutrino has been mis-identified as a standard particle, and is in effect something other than what we think it is. Einstein is still right, but only for shovel shaped plows, which are the particles we can most commonly observe. As the universe is likely more complicated than we can possibly know, the neutrino has perhaps been only now properly identified as something other than a standard particle. It may be that a neutrino is only the tip of a larger particle, slightly outside our known universe's dimensions, and can therefor avoid or have less interaction with the Mass decider, the Higgs Bosun.

[EDIT: It may be that unlike any other particle, the neutrino has the ability to shed mass faster than it can collect mass by being in motion. Or, the faster it moves the more mass it can shed. As I think on it, I'd guess that a neutrino at rest may have more mass than a neutrino in motion, which would make it an inverse particle to those currently understood in quantum mechanics. Well, it makes sense in my head anyway. END EDIT]

What the research will no doubt reveal, is that we need to hurry up and properly identify the Higgs Bosun particle, or better understand the Higgs Bosun effect, before we can say why the neutrino can beat light to where it is going.

Once again, The sub-atomic, quantum mechanical world, does not fit within Einstein's General Relativity model. The two sets of math and science don't fit together. Currently talking about sub-atomic particles, and their strange abilities, does not undo Einstein's work. It may work if we ever get the "Grand Unified Field Theory". That however, may never come to pass.

[Cainanite (imported)]

Okay. I just had to share this thought about the neutrinos and the Higgs Bosun particle. It came to me as I was nodding off to sleep, and it has been hounding me since.

What if the neutrino repels the Higgs Bosun particle? There would be a transfer of energy, but it would work somewhat contrary to the principles of General Relativity, meaning a new equation for the speed of neurtinos will need to be added to the general relativity model. This would also explain why the neutrino would appear to have mass, but defy the ultimate speed limit of the universe. When one tries to measure the mass of a neutrino, the neutrino pushes stray Bosun particles into the particles around it. The particles around it would become momentarily heavier / acquire more mass. The change in mass readings would indicate that it is the neutrino's atomic weight, when it is in fact making that which is measuring it heavier, not adding its own weight.

I see this as a testable hypothesis. Instead of firing neutrinos at another particle to measure it, one would have to fire the neutrino PAST another particle in a near miss, and measure what happens, not to the neutrino, but the target particle.

Part of how this could be possible comes down to a revelation I had about the Higgs Bosun particle. Quantum scientists now believe our universe is expanding over a membrane. It is sometimes referred to as the Holographic Universe theory, in which three dimensions are an illusion to those of us living in this universe. Imagine if the membrane is made of an infinite number of Higgs Bosun particles. The particles are static, and do not move. The universe we know however is expanding in all directions at once. Galaxies move, stars move, planets move, all known matter moves. Perhaps the Higgs Bosun, the very thing that defines Mass in our universe, both does not move, and exists slightly below our universe, defining the boundary layer of the membrane universe.

Think of the Higgs Bosun Layer as a field of uniform dots, like this;

.............................

.............................

.............................

.............................

.............................

.............................

.............................

.............................

All matter in our universe is constantly moving over this field. Each particle in our universe moves over this field, and no matter what direction it moves in, it is in contact with only one Higgs Bosun Dot at a time. The Higgs Bosun effect, however, is a transformation of energy pushing our universe constantly toward entropy. The faster a particle moves, the more effect the Higgs Bosun layer has. A particle reacts to each entropic field of each Higgs Bosun dot. As a particle moves toward the speed of light, it is reacting to the overwhelming value of near infinite entropic fields. It collects mass until it nears infinite mass, and infinite energy is required to overcome infinite entropy.

This would explain why the Higgs Bosun particle remains undiscovered. It is not actually a part of the particles of this universe. It instead is the entropic effect that gives particles mass, as they pass over the membrane layer. No amount of destroying particles in any Mass accelerator will reveal the Higgs Bosun into this universe.

If this is true, then the entropy repelling force of the Neutrino should be measurable, by the value over the speed of light that it can attain. If it can travel 1.5% over the speed of light, then the neutrino can repel 98.5% of the entropic value of the Higgs Bosun. I may have that upside-down. This is where a mathematician could be useful to calculate things.

There might also be a correlation between the neutrino's ability to shed entropy, and the expansion of the universe. Meaning there may be no need for Dark Matter or Dark Energy in our universe to explain how the universe moves, expands, and stays together without flying apart.

These were complex thoughts for me to wrestle with as I was nodding off to sleep, but I can see how it all works much more easily. If I am right, then the Unified field theory might be closer than we think. The Higgs Bosun as part of a separate boundary layer to the Membrane Universe would allow for the observations in the quantum mechanical world to be correct (if incomplete), and as magnified upward, to still alow for Einsteinian observations of General Relativity.

As I am not a theoretical physicist, this is all just a thought experiment. It could rather easily be proven correct or false with the tools we already have, but I don't have access to. (anyone wanna loan me time on the LHC?)

If nothing else, this could be great fodder for a ripping sci-fi story. A star-ship showers itself with a bombardment of neutrinos to overwhelm and eliminate mass, thereby able to accelerate beyond the speed of light. Sound kinda like a plausible explanation of a Star-Drive to me.

Anyway, thanks for reading my thought experiments. I love taxing my grey matter from time to time... even if I'm totally wrong.

[Slammr (imported)]

More details on the "faster than the speed of light" neutrinos By John Timmer (http://arstechnica.com/author/john-timmer/) | Published 3 days agoLast updated about 9 hours ago

http://static.arstechnica.net/2011/09/2 ... -intro.jpg

Last night, in response to a worldwide surge in interest, the OPERA experiment released a

paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897)

that describes t

he experiments that appear to show

neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. And today, CERN broadcast a live seminar in which one of the work's authors described the content of the paper. Both of those emphasized the point of our initial coverage: figuring out whether anything is traveling beyond the speed of light requires incredibly accurate measurements of time and distance, and the OPERA team has made an extensive effort to make its work as accurate as possible.

As a spokesperson for the MINOS neutrino experiment told Ars yesterday (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/201 ... -light.ars), there are three potential sources of error in the timing measurements: distance errors, time-of-flight errors, and errors in the timing of neutrino production. The vast majority of both the paper and the lecture were dedicated to discussing how these errors were reduced (the actual detection of the neutrinos was only a small portion of the paper).

Neutrinos are produced using a proton beam from one of the accelerators that feeds them into the LHC. The protons hit a fixed target and produce unstable particles that decay, releasing a neutrino. The protons move close to, but not at the speed of light, as do the unstable pions; both of these effects were accounted for. The timing of the protons and structure of the two bunches of them used in these experiments is not even, either, so the researchers created a profile of the proton bunch. They also compensated for the timing of the kicker magnet that pushes the bunch out of the accelerator and added detectors that registered them passing through the hardware to get a clearer sense of their timing.

Similar work went into the detector side, where the time between an actual neutrino event and the signal propagating through the hardware and to a field programmable gate array (FPGA) where it was processed was estimated at about 50ns (the neutrinos only arrived 60ns early, so that 50ns is a substantial fraction of the total). But the error in their estimate was only ±2.3ns, as measured by shining a picosecond UV laser on the detector.

Distance travelled created its own problems. The positions of the hardware were measured via GPS, which normally doesn't provide the sort of precision needed for this work. But the labs did multiple samples of the GPS signals, threw out bad ones, compensated for the effect of the Earth's iononsphere, and more. Then, just to check their work, they had an outside team from a German standards institute come in and perform an independent analysis. The end result was a measurement sensitive enough to register both the steady change due to continental drift, as well as a 7cm jump triggered by an earthquake.

Then, the timing of all the events had to be synchronized. At each site, the group put a cesium-based atomic clock, and synchronized it with the GPS signal. Then, they sent a portable atomic clock between the facilities to check. They then ran photons through a fiber optic cable between them, just to make sure.

The end result is that the OPERA team doesn't see any obvious problems in its measurements. All of the errors, when added up, shouldn't be able to account for anything close to the 60ns gap between the neutrinos' arrival and the speed of light. The difference between their speed and that of light is very statistically significant, and the neutrino data itself looks excellent. The team has recorded over 16,000 events now, and the profile of events over time very closely matches the structure of the proton bunches that created them.

But that doesn't mean that this presentation is the last word on the topic. There are a lot of potential sources of error they know about—the paper's table lists a dozen of them. Small errors in each of these could add up to something more significant than their total error. Then there are the classic unknown unknowns. The authors have tried to think of everything, but it's not clear that they can.

The audience at the seminar was already thinking of other sources. For example, GPS signals don't actually penetrate down to the where any of the hardware is, meaning that this system has to track the hardware's motion a bit indirectly. This led one audience member to suggest "if this is a true measurement, drill a bloody hole." The speaker pointed out that commercial drilling equipment isn't accurate enough to go straight from the surface to the detectors, which are kept that deep to filter out most cosmic rays —in short, the solution would create another error.

The other reason that many are voicing skepticism are past measurements of neutrino speeds obtained from supernovae. Since these are so incredibly distant, the small signal seen here would be huge—the neutrinos should arrive roughly four years ahead of the photons. Other experiments on Earth also suggested insignificant differences. One possible explanation for this is the energy of the neutrinos, since OPERA uses much higher energy than the other sources. But the paper indicates that's not likely to be the case, since the authors saw the same signal with both 10 and 40GeV neutrinos.

In the meantime, the physics community will be looking through the paper, trying to spot unaccounted for sources of error. There are two other similar neutrino detectors in use—T2K and MINOS—and they'll undoubtedly be looking into working out the timing of their hardware with the same sort of thoroughness OPERA has.

The theorists, however, will undoubtedly be having a field day. It will be a while before anyone has the chance to test these results independently, giving theorists a chance to try to reconcile fast neutrinos with the rest of physics until then.

The Higgs boson might explain the origins of the universe and dark energy

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/im ... gram.jpgWe still haven't found the Higgs boson, the hypothetical particle that explains why other particles possess mass. But that might not be the only cosmic mystery the Higgs can solve. It could also explain how the universe got its shape.

That's the theory put forward by researchers at Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, or EPFL. They argue that the Higgs boson might allow us to account for inflation, the otherwise unexplained process in which the early universe grew by a factor of at least 10^26 in an instant. It's not a universally accepted idea, even among physicists and cosmologists, but it seems to be the best way to account for the uniformity of the modern universe. (For an excellent, comprehensive primer on inflation, check out this post by our own Dr. Dave Goldberg (http://io9.com/5773158/what-really-happ ... e-big-bang).)

Exactly what caused inflation is still up in the air, and that's where the EPFL physicsts believe the Higgs boson enters the picture:

In its first moments, the Universe was unimaginably dense. Under these conditions, why wouldn't gravity have slowed down its initial expansion? Here's where the Higgs boson enters the game – it can explain the speed and magnitude of the expansion, says Mikhail Shaposhnikov and his team from EPFL's Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology. In this infant Universe, the Higgs, in a condensate phase, would have behaved in a very special way – and in so doing changed the laws of physics. The force of gravity would have been reduced. In this way, physicists can explain how the Universe expanded at such an incredible rate.

Here's where things get really interesting. The researchers found that, as this condensate form of the Higgs boson disappeared and the particles we know today took over, their equations permitted for the existence of a new, massless particle, which they've dubbed the dilaton. This particle is closely related to the Higgs, and shares many of its properties. But the dilaton is only similar to the Higgs - its properties happen to exactly describe what we observe with dark energy, the mysterious property or force that is causing the universe to accelerate its expansion.

The researchers had not set out to explain dark energy when they worked out what role the Higgs boson might have played in the expansion of the universe. Obviously, this is all strictly theoretical - particularly the dilaton - but the fact that their attempt to explain one cosmic mystery happens to also explain another is an encouraging sign that there may well be something to this. These are big claims, of course, and it's doesn't matter how elegant the equations are if we can't find any proof of these particles, but still...this is one hypothesis that's definitely work a closer look.

http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1025802

'I'll eat my shorts if they're right': Physicist dismisses 'discovery' of particles that

can travel faster than the speed of light

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z1Z7FBX9Eh

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z1Z7FBX9Eh)

[Riverwind (imported)]

If they are right, throw out the old math and start over because it will change everything science believes.

I like it.

River

[bobover3 (imported)]

Doctor Who is obviously right. Should have asked him all along.