51–60 of 84 posts
Does anybody know why they were doing this experiment (measuring speed fo neutrinos) at all? Were they assuming that neutrinos travel faster than speed of light in the first place?
My guess is there's something wrong with the statistical modeling, but I realize that's not a very useful statement. I missed the press conference, but I did read the paper and I even understood a few things. :-) It was good to see they even thought about seismic activity (centimeters). One thing I noticed in both the article and the media is that the effect is never expressed in terms of distance (about 15 meters),…
D of earth = 12756km, and assuming a sphere (my physics prof would be proud), I'm computing that 730km covers a ~6.6 degree arc. Also assuming a 100m underground tunnel, the distance would be 21m shorter than its above-ground measurement. Someone needs to recheck my math, though.
I watched the news conf. this morning. The neutrino production "curve" looks like a a square wave pulse as a function of time ____| |_____ and the detection points look like this ___________________________________| |_____ with ∆t ~= 700km/c time distance between the two pulses. The claim is that the "most likely guess" of the received pulse shape (obtained from many measurements) is too far right to be consistent wi…
This would apply to every paper in existence. If you want to know the methodology, you read that section of the paper. Putting it in the title only obscures the message.
It's true that it makes the analysis a lot harder, and one of the questions after the talk was about making shorter bunches of neutrinos. The duration of the pulses are probably just set by the width of the proton bunches in the ring, in which case it would be nontrivial to make it much shorter.
My guess is there's something wrong with the statistical modeling, but I realize that's not a very useful statement. I missed the press conference, but I did read the paper and I even understood a few things. :-) It was good to see they even thought about seismic activity (centimeters). One thing I noticed in both the article and the media is that the effect is never expressed in terms of distance (about 15 meters),…
D of earth = 12756km, and assuming a sphere (my physics prof would be proud), I'm computing that 730km covers a ~6.6 degree arc. Also assuming a 100m underground tunnel, the distance would be 21m shorter than its above-ground measurement. Someone needs to recheck my math, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All true. But to be fair, you're praising the easy stuff. This is one of those one-in-a-career, truly groundbreaking results. They don't have to sell it. They just write it up in plain language and it sells itself.
Most importantly, they're not presenting the finding as fact. They're really asking for anyone that can prove them wrong, because they don't believe it, and are almost positive that there's something wrong with either their methodology or measurements.
And, yet, you've spent lots and lots of energy and you can't find the problem yourself. And what if there is something there? There are many famous cases of experiments that weren't confirmed by theory until well after the fact; theorists often don't bother to think about a particular corner of the unthinkable until an experiment calls attention to it. So you've just got to publish your data, but also be prepared to laugh it off when the mistake gets identified, or the data proves irreproducible. And then to spend the rest of your career laughing it off, because this spurious result may be the most famous thing you ever publish.
You've got to have a good sense of humor to survive as an experimentalist.
---
[1] I wish I remembered which teacher said this.
This press release is a perfect example of how to write a press release for a high-profile, possibly groundbreaking discovery. Understated, but still properly summarizes the importance of the result, and above all doesn't make any hysterical claims. Instead, it just presents the discovery, cites the paper, gives some background, grabs quotes from the scientists to show the reasoning behind their actions, and leaves i…
All true. But to be fair, you're praising the easy stuff. This is one of those one-in-a-career, truly groundbreaking results. They don't have to sell it. They just write it up in plain language and it sells itself.
And if it's wrong and you overstate it, it's again one of those one-in-a-career results, but merely because that's where your career as a scientist ends.
I watched the news conf. this morning. The neutrino production "curve" looks like a a square wave pulse as a function of time ____| |_____ and the detection points look like this ___________________________________| |_____ with ∆t ~= 700km/c time distance between the two pulses. The claim is that the "most likely guess" of the received pulse shape (obtained from many measurements) is too far right to be consistent wi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the best to answer this, but I'll briefly say that if Einstein's theories don't hold, it will be in the same sense that Newton's theories didn't hold post-Einstein. Newton's theories still apply, for all practical purposes, to all every-day life situations, and Einstein's theories will still apply, for all practical purposes, to every fringe case seen so far ("every-day" nuclear physics, etc) until this exper…
We sort of already know that "Einstein is wrong" in this strong sense, since GR is incompatible with quantum field theory. It still works just as well within its realm of applicability, though.
Guys, I'm sorry I missed this recent news but I've a question that I hope some people can answer for me. So does this mean that Einstein's theory might not hold? Do we see any well-established theories break as result of this? I'm totally naive about this but curious so any answers will be appreciated.
My background is in physics and one of my first programming jobs was writing code for a lab of international importance. At the time, I would engage the other members of the lab in an ongoing debate about Einstein, where I'd take the position that Einstein was wrong (About anything, or everything, whatever the handy topic was.) I was, and am, an Einsteinian skeptic. I learned a lot in that, and one thing that actuall…
And that of all the thousands of folks who have claimed to have a "proof" that relativity is wrong, the they break down as about seventy percent simple misconceptions and thirty percent complete nonsense, with the remainder being zero?
At the time, I would engage the other members of the lab in an ongoing debate about Einstein, where I'd take the position that Einstein was wrong (About anything, or everything, whatever the handy topic was.) I was, and am, an Einsteinian skeptic.
It's a good thing you left physics for programming, because it doesn't sound like you have a particularly strong commitment to scientific principles. To get a Nobel Prize it would be perfectly sufficient to show convincingly that Einstein was wrong about one thing [insert caveats here, obviously I don't mean trivial things]. If you believe Einstein was wrong about "anything and everything" then you're just committing the cardinal sin of believing things because you want them to be true, rather than because there's sufficiently convincing evidence that they're true.
A great article on various disagreements between Tesla's and Einstein's view of the physical world. http://www.writingriffs.com/2009/09/13/tesla-vs-einstein-tra... Will Tesla have the last laugh?