Science: Don't Worry, Physics Is Safe

[Torrasque]

Because one of the most expensive scientific endeavors by mankind, measured something inaccurately, all of science freaked out for a little while, and realized their measurements were inaccurate a smidgen...
Guess they should have got the premium model eh?

 

[Nailz]

This is a terrible article for a number of reasons.

"Science now has an explanation for that."

We need to stop saying things like this, this is a single paper which is not peer reviewed,
(original article here http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27260/ .)
Since when does a single paper, not peer reviewed, constitute saying "science now has an explanation for that".

If you read the comments on the original article there's almost exclusively criticism of the paper's poor methodology, without a single response to the criticisms.

The most basic being
for example "From the referenced paper: "The clocks in the OPERA experiment are orbiting the earth in GPS satellites."

I believe that's incorrect. The clocks in the OPERA experiment are atomic clocks on the ground that are synchronized by GPS clocks. If I remember correctly, they are then checked against each other using other on-ground, highly accurate atomic clocks."

It's not "Scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands did the math" it was one paper by one man, "Ronald van Elburg".

If your so lazy that you don't even go past DVice to original source before reporting, as you clearly haven't, why even post at all.

Lazy lazy lazy journalism,

and please, please, stop saying "Science says..."
de-anthropomorphize science because it does no one good, it just creates the same dogmatic lack of critical thought which most ironically criticize the religious of while being guilty of themselves.

Whether this man's paper is right or wrong, this article represents everything that's wrong with the media's treatment of science, and frankly I think that that phenomena is more damaging to us than any dissolution of relativity. If you are unwilling to address primary sources, or even be aware of them while reporting, I suggest you apply for a job at Fox news as this seems to be their preferred M.O.

 

[McMullen]

This is a terrible article for a number of reasons.

"Science now has an explanation for that."

We need to stop saying things like this, this is a single paper which is not peer reviewed,
(original article here http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27260/ .)
Since when does a single paper, not peer reviewed, constitute saying "science now has an explanation for that".

If you read the comments on the original article there's almost exclusively criticism of the paper's poor methodology, without a single response to the criticisms.

The most basic being
for example "From the referenced paper: "The clocks in the OPERA experiment are orbiting the earth in GPS satellites."

I believe that's incorrect. The clocks in the OPERA experiment are atomic clocks on the ground that are synchronized by GPS clocks. If I remember correctly, they are then checked against each other using other on-ground, highly accurate atomic clocks."

It's not "Scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands did the math" it was one paper by one man, "Ronald van Elburg".

If your so lazy that you don't even go past DVice to original source before reporting, as you clearly haven't, why even post at all.

Lazy lazy lazy journalism,

and please, please, stop saying "Science says..."
de-anthropomorphize science because it does no one good, it just creates the same dogmatic lack of critical thought which most ironically criticize the religious of while being guilty of themselves.

Whether this man's paper is right or wrong, this article represents everything that's wrong with the media's treatment of science, and frankly I think that that phenomena is more damaging to us than any dissolution of relativity. If you are unwilling to address primary sources, or even be aware of them while reporting, I suggest you apply for a job at Fox news as this seems to be their preferred M.O.

Lazy journalism is what he does. I've learned to expect no better from him, and just be happy if he can get through an article without mentioning Skynet or alluding to shady leagues of evil scientists plotting our demise or subjugation.

I think what he's really trying to do is write like they do at cracked.com or something, which I wholeheartedly approve of, as they are hilarious. He doesn't do a good job at all though, and the only thing his writing ends up having in common with Cracked is that it generates a lot of facepalms. The difference is that at Cracked, we facepalm at the ridiculously stupid things that the subjects of the articles did, while here, we facepalm at the ridiculously stupid things that the writer of the article says.

 

[Giest4life]

I'm not a math/physics whiz. In fact, I'm having a hard time passing my Pre-calc II class in college. But I know this much: a single paper which is not peer reviewed is not an adequate to explain the phenomenon that has befuddled top sciencetists in the world. This is a link to the original paper [http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1110/1110.2685v3.pdf]

 

[Something Amyss]

Sure, they tell me that now, after I've thrown out all my physics.

 

[Para199x]

I'm not a math/physics whiz. In fact, I'm having a hard time passing my Pre-calc II class in college. But I know this much: a single paper which is not peer reviewed is not an adequate to explain the phenomenon that has befuddled top sciencetists in the world. This is a link to the original paper [http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1110/1110.2685v3.pdf]

That's the same with the thing being a problem in the first place though, if the original authors say it's most likely an error I don't think anybody should be worrying, and even if it turn out to be correct that the neutrinos went faster than c. Relativity would still give a good approximation of the nature. It has predicted far too many phenomena to be completely discarded even if it is discredited, same as classical physics.

 

[Eri]

This article is completely wrong. Here's a screenshot explaining.

Spoiler

 

[the spud]

Ohhhh, why!?! Why couldn't you have let us believe the lie? It was so much fun while it lasted!

 

[ph0b0s123]

Something does not smell right here. If the explanation was this 'simple', why was there a big mystery in the first place. I would have thought that when the results started coming through saying what they did, this would have been one of the first things they though about. Still seems odd to have the timing done things that are moving themselves, as this does bring extra frames to be thought about. But it should not have been a surprise as there are lots of things up in orbit that must need relativity corrections done to their clocks every so often.

If the use of GPS for the timing is right then I am really surprised that this was not taken into account during the experiment. It's not like there was a new phenomenon occurring that was unexpected. It almost seems like some people did not do their homework before performing this experiment, and then released their confusion to the world. To be honest it makes them look a bit silly.

 

[Eri]

Ohhhh, why!?! Why couldn't you have let us believe the lie? It was so much fun while it lasted!

Something does not smell right here. If the explanation was this 'simple', why was there a big mystery in the first place. I would have thought that when the results started coming through saying what they did, this would have been one of the first things they though about. Still seems odd it have the timing done things that are moving themselves, as this does bring extra frames to be thought about.

If the use of GPS for the timing is right then I am really surprised that this was not taken into account during the experiment. It's not like there was a new phenomenon occurring that was unexpected. It almost seems like some people did not do their homework before performing this experiment, and then released their confusion to the world.

Really odd.

Read_v

This article is completely wrong. Here's a screenshot explaining.

Spoiler

 

[the spud]

Hooray!

Huzzah! We may still have hope! Maybe...I am not so certain I want to go out and say "Yep, this definitely wasn't a calculation error", but at least it may still be possible.

 

[Ghengis John]

And after they promised Billy that dinosaur too...

 

[Lizardon]

Really? These top scientist didn't take into account relativity? I find that hard to believe.
Anyway what we have here is a non-peer reviewed paper explaining a phenomenon observed in a non-peer reviewed experiment. We just need to wait and let the system run it's course to get to the bottom of this and not jump to conclusions.

 

[Venats]

That's the same with the thing being a problem in the first place though, if the original authors say it's most likely an error I don't think anybody should be worrying, and even if it turn out to be correct that the neutrinos went faster than c. Relativity would still give a good approximation of the nature. It has predicted far too many phenomena to be completely discarded even if it is discredited, same as classical physics.

Its not so much that people are eager to throw out Relativity, more so that they are wanting to throw out/shrug off the boundaries set by causality, Lorentz invariance, and the metric tensor (only somewhat, more the former two) on the concept of traveling the cosmos in a lifetime.

If you add speeds greater than c, you start having issues with time travel via the combination of Causality, SR, and Lorentz Invariance. As you start seeing pesky terms like negative mass with tachyons which defy all of QFT because, with negative mass, they cannot be waves which doesn't work at all with QFT.

Unfortunately, getting around any of the above (at the current time) would seem to require the discarding of all of SR, Lorentz Invariance, and causality... that is if we are only limited to traveling our current 4D (-ct, x1, x2, x3) brane of existence.

I think, one of these days, I am going to write up a giant topic explaining all of this for everyone here, and some loop holes. Would be fun... and good practice.

---

As for the OP:

This paper is garbage, it only shows the incompetence of the author for not realizing that GPS was never an issue.

 

[cookyy2k]

Wait, that doesn't make sense. GPS satellites are in a geosynchronous orbit. The Earth doesn't appear to move from their perspective. What detail am I missing here?

GPS satellites arn't geostationary that's what. If they were you couldn't get GPS at the poles or even within the Arctic/Antarctic circle as the satellites would be below the horizon. Also the geosynchronous orbit (as their is only 1) is 22,236 mi above the Earth's mean sea level. That would mean you'd need a dish on your car that constantly adjusted to get signal as it'd be too weak for inbuilt antenna, plus you'd need to know where you are on the Earth to find the satellite to find where you are on Earth, catch 22.

This is the way it works really, it's a rather complex little system all in all, with the various satellites in differently inclined orbits.

EDIT. Also OT, this had to be at the very least an extremely special case. Much of the tech we have today relies on c being constant and unbreakable, if this was not true the tech would not work, meaning that in all but very special cases c would be the universal speed limit. As it turned out this doesn't even appear to be special case. But it was never going to turn out to be a relativity breaker as everyone hyped it to be. Hell we KNOW Newton's laws of motion are wrong, since when you go to v=0.9c they don't work, they also predict the orbital period of Mercury wrong. However in the case of Newton's laws of motion they make a nice little approximation in the low velocity limit, as if this case with v>c would mean relativity would be a nice approximation in the v<c limit.

 

[Niccolo]

Words.

More words.

Ah, I see. So what you're saying is that the satellite drifts north and south over time and this causes time dilation that affects the distance measurements, yes? I never thought about that, I always assumed that GPS satellites really were perfectly stationary to a ground observer. Well, ya learn something new every day. Danke.

Kein Problem.

Of course they are perfectly stationary to a ground observer. Unless the ground observer moves at 99% light speed through a space of 700km. That's the point. For the usual use case (fast moving car, boat or airplane), gps satellites are stationary enough.

Okay, look. It was probably the wrong word for them to use. Just think of it as a normal satellite that orbits the earth.

Are you seriously telling me they didnt compensate for this in the calculations? :/

They're particle physicists, not geophysicists. They probably forgot that that even occurs. It's not like you'd expect the rotation of the goddamn earth to play a part.


Lastly: Why does my recaptcha have a pi symbol in it?

 

[Harbinger_]

So their excuse is relativity did it? Lame. I wanted a dinosaur too.

 

[gigastrike]

*Sigh* [sub]For the love of Christ[/sub]...the GPS satelite has nothing to do with it. That was an example they gave to say that, while we feel like we're not moving anywhere on the ground, we would see that we are actually moving as the Earth is if we were to look from space. In theory, any non-Earth body could have been used in the example (like the moon or a space shuttle or something). Even if little details don't match up it doesn't mean that the article is wrong, it's just a bad example.

 

[Baresark]

I'm not surprised on this outcome. The fact is, the discovery of a singular particle wouldn't destroy reality and science as we know it. Especially since so much has been theorized and even proven based on the current setup. If anything, it would mean that you would have to add another element to physics as we know it.

As far as all the questions on how the calculations missed this: it's easy. And it's not all that uncommon. For instance, the Manhattan Project consisted of some 186,000 people working on, and among that number, a few discovered errors in math that whole project was based off of. Reality is much different than peoples perspective of it.

 

[Therumancer]

Are you seriously telling me they didnt compensate for this in the calculations? :/

Well to be honest I kind of expected something like this to come up, and I might have said so in these forums before. Not the miscalculations, but that someone would claim there were miscalculations with authority and as a result this was going to disappear whether it was real or not.

Simply put, sudden, radical change is bad and a lot of powerful, vested interests want things to stay like they are now and progress VERY slowly. Things like viable space travel present threats to terrestrial interests, for example: mineral shortages and such mean that the guys who control the minerals make huge amounts of money off of their resource, and have a say in a lot of things politically and developmentally, as they can decide who gets what share of what they produce above and beyond any promised monies (ie they can sell to whom they want to). Needless to say these guys don't want to see us harvesting resources from the asteroid belts, they are re-assured by the possibility, but don't want that to happen until they have made every possible scrap of money they possibly can. Given that these current interests can influance the people who make desicians they can keep down threats of this sort.... and this is only one group that would be threatened by the shift in global power balance this discovery represented.

Events like this don't always happen just in the political/conspiricy related side of things either. For example, you might have taken note of the wild coincidence in how "Tesla Motors" is releasing their first electric cars which are bound to become cheaper and more availible with each year. Three of their major engineers just died in a plane accident, which despite all positive hype about the future, is probably going to slow them down a lot. There is a reason why not many people had been doing this despite various techologies to develop viable transportation being availible, cartels of all sorts (like the oil/gas cartel) don't like threats to their business and power, or changes that will render them irrelevent. If they can't stop you legally, well "Hit Men" DO exist even if it isn't quite like it is in the movies, and the ones that do their job well arrange accidents.

Despite how it might sound I'm not much of a conspiricy theorist, I'm more of a realist, largely based on what I might do to protect my own interests given the resources. Having looked at things done by various cartels (drugs, oil, diamonds, etc...) all through history, sometimes which have not been very subtle I tend to read between the lines, and just as I was kind of waiting to see what was going to happen with Tesla motors (and something did happen, and I imagine more will happen if they remain a threat), I kind of figured one way or another a development in physics that "changes everything" and seems too good an optimistic to be true was going to be somehow slapped down and "discredited" even if it was entirely legitimate. The world just doesn't change like that, for good or ill, we don't let it.