Science: Don't Worry, Physics Is Safe

gigastrike

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Jul 13, 2008
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*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

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Dec 19, 2010
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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

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Nov 28, 2007
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draythefingerless said:
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.
 

Broken Blade

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Nov 29, 2007
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As always, there's a Portal quote for this.

POTaTOS: "You saved science!"

On a more serious note, once more, someone did the math wrong. Too many great things have been ruined by poor mathematics. Ah well. Back to dreaming of FTL.
 

Hungry Donner

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Mar 19, 2009
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I'm not surprised that this was cleared up so quickly, however I am surprised the perp wasn't a wormhole created by hyper-dense Italian cooking. I guess I owe my friends five bucks.
 

Orks da best

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Oct 12, 2011
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normally i love science, but in this case, i am an excpection.

Curse you science, why do have spit in the face of fun things!!! Unless they only did this so calm peole down... faster the light travel is sill possible!
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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Mimsofthedawg said:
Therumancer said:
draythefingerless said:
Are you seriously telling me they didnt compensate for this in the calculations? :/
Things like viable space travel present threats to terrestrial interests
I just stopped right here.

Because even if this was true and it was the first inkling of baby steps towards FTL or any other sort of interstellar travel, we're still SUPER far off, to the point that these vested interests probably wouldn't care.

If this was true and was the first inkling of baby steps towards FTL, it would be like saying primitive, chinese fireworks from 2000 years ago were the foundation of every modern space program.

A stretch? Yes. completely false? no.

so I just think the rest of your point is moot.

Having said that, I too had a feeling they'd come up with SOME reason... not so much for any conspiracy purposes, but more because science WILL NOT accept a radical notion unless it can ABSOLUTELY BE PROVEN TRUE WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT.

This is a shadow. A very big, dark, cold shadow.
If you didn't read the post then you really have no idea what your even responding to.

That said, the gist of what I was saying is that I have my doubts if these recent revelations over the "mistakes" are accurate. Just as I have my doubts that upon bucking the system and releasing a truely viable electric car that a bunch of the key engineers for "Tesla Motors" just happened to die "accidently" in a plane crash.

In this case we're not talking about something that is a vague foundation for future technologies that haven't even been conceived. The discovery of superlimenal particles had a lot of very obvious meanings and we've already thought of the technologies it's going to lead to. The kinds of interests we're dealing with aren't going to wait until the 11th hour to try and stop something at the last possible second before it can cost them their fortunes and powers, these groups stay in power by ruthlessly dealing with anything they perceive as a threat, preferably in it's infancy before it can pick up that kind of momentum. This is exactly the point where they would have to act to quash/control it if they were ever going to.

In short, I believe they did adjust for these calculations and the original reports were correct, simply because such a basic mistake is very unlikely given the people involved, and the number of people that were looking at this when it was annouced. I think such particles were discovered, but it's being surpessed, and the current revelations are being done to quell public interest since most people are just going to buy it like you are.

See, to me the odds of the people involved having made this kind of a basic mistake, especially more than once given the verifications involved, are just as ridiculous if not more so than the suggestion that existing interests that would be threatened by this would take action.

The thing is that Occam's razor can be double edged in cases like this when both ends of something are equally improbable. While the experts involved having made a mistake seems simpler, when you consider who was involved, the issue, and the level this was at before it was even annouced, this kind of mistake becomes incredibly unlikely. Conspiricy theories are not exactly simple, or likely creatures, but in this case there is enough precedent based on the past, outed, behavior of cartels and big business interests to make it likely that youd see action of that sort here given what is at stake.

In the end we'll doubtlessly have to agree to disagree, but I for one think this is being sat on, will be surpressed, and then whenever the powers that be feel that absolutly need to do so or have wringed out their current options, this will be re-discovered. Much like how some drug companies have been caught sitting on medicines they didn't want to release because there was more money in treating symptoms than causes, just on a bigger scale than those scandals.
 
Sep 14, 2009
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draythefingerless said:
Are you seriously telling me they didnt compensate for this in the calculations? :/
yeah no offense, but that was one of the first principles we learned when covering the speed of light in physics in high school...

sometimes..i feel smart, other times the shit scientists do blows my mind out of the water.

this time, it was the former
 

Silas13013

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Mar 31, 2011
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Therumancer said:
Mimsofthedawg said:
Therumancer said:
draythefingerless said:
Are you seriously telling me they didnt compensate for this in the calculations? :/
Things like viable space travel present threats to terrestrial interests
I just stopped right here.

Because even if this was true and it was the first inkling of baby steps towards FTL or any other sort of interstellar travel, we're still SUPER far off, to the point that these vested interests probably wouldn't care.

If this was true and was the first inkling of baby steps towards FTL, it would be like saying primitive, chinese fireworks from 2000 years ago were the foundation of every modern space program.

A stretch? Yes. completely false? no.

so I just think the rest of your point is moot.

Having said that, I too had a feeling they'd come up with SOME reason... not so much for any conspiracy purposes, but more because science WILL NOT accept a radical notion unless it can ABSOLUTELY BE PROVEN TRUE WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT.

This is a shadow. A very big, dark, cold shadow.
If you didn't read the post then you really have no idea what your even responding to.

That said, the gist of what I was saying is that I have my doubts if these recent revelations over the "mistakes" are accurate. Just as I have my doubts that upon bucking the system and releasing a truely viable electric car that a bunch of the key engineers for "Tesla Motors" just happened to die "accidently" in a plane crash.

In this case we're not talking about something that is a vague foundation for future technologies that haven't even been conceived. The discovery of superlimenal particles had a lot of very obvious meanings and we've already thought of the technologies it's going to lead to. The kinds of interests we're dealing with aren't going to wait until the 11th hour to try and stop something at the last possible second before it can cost them their fortunes and powers, these groups stay in power by ruthlessly dealing with anything they perceive as a threat, preferably in it's infancy before it can pick up that kind of momentum. This is exactly the point where they would have to act to quash/control it if they were ever going to.

In short, I believe they did adjust for these calculations and the original reports were correct, simply because such a basic mistake is very unlikely given the people involved, and the number of people that were looking at this when it was annouced. I think such particles were discovered, but it's being surpessed, and the current revelations are being done to quell public interest since most people are just going to buy it like you are.

See, to me the odds of the people involved having made this kind of a basic mistake, especially more than once given the verifications involved, are just as ridiculous if not more so than the suggestion that existing interests that would be threatened by this would take action.

The thing is that Occam's razor can be double edged in cases like this when both ends of something are equally improbable. While the experts involved having made a mistake seems simpler, when you consider who was involved, the issue, and the level this was at before it was even annouced, this kind of mistake becomes incredibly unlikely. Conspiricy theories are not exactly simple, or likely creatures, but in this case there is enough precedent based on the past, outed, behavior of cartels and big business interests to make it likely that youd see action of that sort here given what is at stake.

In the end we'll doubtlessly have to agree to disagree, but I for one think this is being sat on, will be surpressed, and then whenever the powers that be feel that absolutly need to do so or have wringed out their current options, this will be re-discovered. Much like how some drug companies have been caught sitting on medicines they didn't want to release because there was more money in treating symptoms than causes, just on a bigger scale than those scandals.
You remind me of this man: http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldx27uZkuY1qb91qpo1_500.jpg
In other words (if you don't know the meme) it's a guy who claims that human evolution and achievements over the years are due to aliens since we don't know. It's kind of like saying god did it; ignoring all science and logic and coming up with your own wild and illogical conclusions. You quote Occam's razor but ignore that the logical thing is that someone made a mistake, not that millions of testable theories and laws are wrong and the mysterious aliens/government/god is suppressing this information.


I for one am not surprised at all. Anyone with any real physics knowledge, or just general life experience knows this happens often and then gets disproven. A while back, someone claimed to have created cold fusion, ushering in a new era of free energy. The error then was similar to now, one of their measuring instruments was off by a tiny amount and came up with the ridiculous notion of free energy.
 

lumenadducere

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May 19, 2008
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I figured they'd come up with an actual explanation eventually, but I was still hoping they wouldn't and that they'd actually managed to "break" physics (and by break I don't actually mean break). Kind of a shame that that turned out to not be the case.
 

AngleWyrm

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Feb 2, 2009
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Earnest Cavalli said:
Meanwhile, the detector in Italy is moving just as fast as the rest of the Earth, and from our perspective it's moving towards the source. This means that the neutrino will have a slightly shorter distance to travel than it would if the experiment were stationary. We stop timing the neutrino when it arrives in Italy, and calculate that it moves at a speed that's comfortably below the speed of light.
So they are saying that the planet moved/rotated while the nutrino was in flight, shortening the distance. This seems like an extraordinary claim to overlooking something. Especially considering the CERN facility has been operating particle accelerators since the 1950s.

The test to prove this particular argument one way or the other is to just point the nutrino gun in the opposite direction, and then time the shot from an equal distance away. If planetary motion is indeed to blame, then there should be an equal but opposite error from the expected time of flight.