Science: Don't Worry, Physics Is Safe

[Kuth]

Whats this, a science article on the Escapist with some real science facts in it? Well this IS a big day...

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

Spoiler

Well if the internet says so... I'm personally waiting until New Scientist runs with this before claiming anything either way.

Yeah this explanation just would not add up. Given the controversy and the amount of testing they did, it wouldn't make sense that they did not factor in the speed of the earth. That's much like testing the speed of a bullet while going 100 mph on a road and forgetting that you were going 100 mph with the detecting equipment. If this is true, they wasted a lot of time on something they could have figured out. If it isn't, the morons who didn't read the damn report needed to ask questions and evaluated all evidence before making a damn theory about the results... you know.. the whole scientific method?

 

[Torrasque]

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For the umpteenth time, they did not release their results as a discovery. They released it as something they were pretty sure was an error. They made their results available so that other scientists could check it and find the error that they were unable to. They said it would be really neat if it wasn't an error, but that it was very likely to be an error and needed to be thoroughly reviewed by the physics community before any revisions to current theory were made.

They did exactly what they were supposed to do.

Suppose that in a math class I stumble upon some mathematical equation that, solved in a certain way, appears to make 1 equal to 2. Suppose I ask the rest of the class to help me figure out what I did wrong. If what just happened with this neutrino thing were repeated in that class, it would mean the Journalism Club members in that class would have started running through the halls proclaiming that I have proved 1 equals 2, the entire school hears about it, and gets all excited. Five minutes later someone points out that I dropped a negative sign during one of my calculations, and the equation goes back to being perfectly mundane. The students in the school accuse me of getting everyone excited and completely ignores the Journalism Club's hyping of my erroneous result and their downplaying of what I really said, which was, again, a request for someone to help me figure out what I did wrong.

If it sounds like a completely ridiculous and implausible situation, that's because it is. Yet, it happened pretty much that way with the neutrino speed measurement. That's how insane people like you are. You turn real life into the kind of trashy sitcom written by people who don't know any other way of creating humor except by making the characters hold the idiot ball and never let go.

People like you are why the phrase "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" exists.

For the record, I was being sarcastic.
That is why I stopped reading your post as soon as I saw it was more than a few lines long.
Joking is... hard? =/

 

[RicoGrey]

Am I the last motherf%$*er on earth who does not have GPS, even these neutrinos have f#&$ing GPS. Imma go get lost down some rural country road and never return.

 

[Coffinshaker]

ok, I get what they're "trying" to say with relativity and all, but I'm having a bit of difficulty with some of the logic here...

so here's the prob... if you're on a train and you fire a bullet that goes say, 100mph (idk, whatever) and the train is moving at a uniform 100mph, then no matter where you point the gun inside that train, that bullet will move at 100mph (from the point of reference of inside the train)!! see, it has initial velocity. to someone on the ground, if you shot it from the back of the train to the front, it would be going 200mph.

that is exactly what they are trying to say with this whole "you're on a satellite" thing. yes, from up above, the earth moves and both reference points are moving as well... HOWEVER, this is makes 3 very distinct possibilities...

1 - if there is a loss of time due to the movement of the earth, then you are acknowledging that these particles IGNORE that initial velocity! it means that, no matter how fast that train is moving, they will move at 100mpg based on the ground reference. to me, this would be catastrophic to physics.

2 - the particle is actually moving as fast as the claims made it out to be.

3 - or there is "something" that is effecting the speed of the particles to interrupt that initial velocity. which would be extraordinarily peculiar. time dilation pocket?

using the earth's rotation, if I understand the article correctly, isn't doing this justice... I mean, if point A and B are moving, well... shouldn't the trajectories of the particles be off? A and B aren't moving in a straight line ya know... also... remember your Monty Python song! the earth is moving around the sun, moving around the milky way, moving in the universe and it all adds up to being a hellova fast. so relativity starts getting stretched a little thin when you try to make it fit.

put another way, what they just tried to explain is the equivalent of shooting a gun at a train moving towards you. meaning, point A is on the ground and point B is on the train coming at you. yes, in that scenario, the bullet would appear to have traveled faster than it should have, but unless the facility in Italy decided to sprout legs and made a mad dash towards Geneva, then this explanation from the relativity fanboys has just as many holes as the anti-relativity camp.

long story short... the BS wars are a long way from over. I'm still on the fence with all of this...

 

[Olrod]

Time dilation. Time goes slower as you go faster, the Earth's speed through space is not 0, so Earth is subject to a few nanoseconds of time dilation.

The neutrinos weren't going faster than light speed, it just looked like they were travelling faster than they really were because Earth is moving too.

 

[Para199x]

snip

snip...that is if we are only limited to traveling our current 4D (-ct, x1, x2, x3) brane of existence.... snip

to be a /b/tard

>implying string theory is anything other than a religion

 

[Venats]

to be a /b/tard

>implying string theory is anything other than a religion

What I was referring to wasn't string, as I would have said 12-dimensionality specifically. Multidimensionality can be used exclusively from string theory, and has been used for mucking around with the metric tensor to explain certain phenomena or, at least, attempt to in the standard model without delving into strings or other such.

Just because something is a braneworld theory, doesn't really mean it is religiously tied to strings. Also, using the word brane is a quick and concise method to say 'this plane of existence'.

 

[Para199x]

to be a /b/tard

>implying string theory is anything other than a religion

What I was referring to wasn't string, as I would have said 12-dimensionality specifically. Multidimensionality can be used exclusively from string theory, and has been used for mucking around with the metric tensor to explain certain phenomena or, at least, attempt to in the standard model without delving into strings or other such.

Just because something is a braneworld theory, doesn't really mean it is religiously tied to strings. Also, using the word brane is a quick and concise method to say 'this plane of existence'.

Apologies used to people talking about string theory as fact. So instantly assume so

 

[ph0b0s123]

This weeks QI had a discussion about GPS unrelated to this topic, but happened to get onto the need to correct for GPS satellites.
@2:00

Even comedians and a 'TV' scientist get that you need to account for relativity with GPS satellites.

So even though not popular when I said this before, I say again, that the people who set-up this neutrino experiment really need to have their degree's checked to have missed something so basic. That is assuming that the not correcting for the GPS satellites was the reason the neutrinos looked to be going faster than the speed of light. Which again I doubt as an explanation, as I cannot believe any scientist worth their salt would miss something so basic. If they did, I don't think is is unfair to say they screwed up.

 

[Rhythm]

Original article

So it seems that they have re-run the experiment (in a slightly different way) and still got the same result. Time to rewrite physics? Or perhaps just stop letting the work experience boy do the maths...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236