EPTOn February 23 2012 11:30 Uncultured wrote:
You have no idea what you're talking about.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Neither do they
AYY--OOOOOO
just kidding, but i'm kinda glad it was false
CERN finds neutrinos faster than light - Page 45
| Forum Index > General Forum |
|
johnnywup
United States3858 Posts
Neither do they AYY--OOOOOO just kidding, but i'm kinda glad it was false | ||
|
tronix
United States95 Posts
anywho this would not surprise me if it is indeed true (in the sense that they cannot find error in their methods). quantum particles are clouded in mystery that far surpasses simple concepts like the speed of light constant. they are already known to ignore other properties of the space time continuum. | ||
|
Hall0wed
United States8486 Posts
On February 23 2012 10:35 ShangMing wrote: "Unfortunately"? "Unfortunately, everything we know about physics up to this point is still (experimentally) correct."? I don't even... Pretty much every physicist in the world dreams of finding a discovery like this actually. | ||
|
Antisocialmunky
United States5912 Posts
| ||
|
AxelTVx
Canada916 Posts
On February 23 2012 10:35 ShangMing wrote: "Unfortunately"? "Unfortunately, everything we know about physics up to this point is still (experimentally) correct."? I don't even... Unforunately is right. By changing our knowledge of physics, we allow ourselves to further explore the possibilities that are out in front of us. What scientist wouldn't want to do that? Prove Eintin wrong? That's an amazing feat at that. | ||
|
GGTeMpLaR
United States7226 Posts
Coming up with a better alternative theory that immediately has more theoretical predictive power and ends up having more empirical predictive power, that's the true gold medal. | ||
|
Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
 ). Not many physicists will be surprised if the results go back to light speed. Quite a few may be disappointed though.  Also I feel a bit sorry for the other neutrino experiments that are putting in a lot of work for a loose cable in an other experiment (if this turns out to explain the excess speed). | ||
|
Cinim
Denmark866 Posts
On February 23 2012 10:35 ShangMing wrote: "Unfortunately"? "Unfortunately, everything we know about physics up to this point is still (experimentally) correct."? I don't even... If there is something faster than the speed of light, that means time travels is 100 % a possibility! | ||
|
woody60707
United States1863 Posts
On February 23 2012 17:34 Cinim wrote: If there is something faster than the speed of light, that means time travels is 100 % a possibility! Or just a flying blackhole. | ||
|
oGoZenob
France1503 Posts
On February 23 2012 17:34 Cinim wrote: If there is something faster than the speed of light, that means time travels is 100 % a possibility! No it's not. And as a phD physics student, I'm kinda relieved that everything I did and learn so far is not entirely false, and as to be restarted from scratch | ||
|
Klockan3
Sweden2866 Posts
On February 23 2012 19:20 oGoZenob wrote: No it's not. And as a phD physics student, I'm kinda relieved that everything I did and learn so far is not entirely false, and as to be restarted from scratch You obviously didn't learn much at all about physics then and instead just learned a bunch of formula manipulation. No matter what new discoveries are made, the physics you studied will always be valid since it is valid in all but an extremely small subset of phenomena. The only exceptions are things that aren't experimentally verified like string theory. Also we already know that the physics we are taught are wrong, the reason is that no model can take account for all phenomena so we are obviously missing a few pieces and thus our formulas aren't exact even in idealized situations. | ||
|
Miyoshino
314 Posts
On February 23 2012 15:23 AxelTVx wrote: Unforunately is right. By changing our knowledge of physics, we allow ourselves to further explore the possibilities that are out in front of us. What scientist wouldn't want to do that? Prove Eintin wrong? That's an amazing feat at that. No it isn't. This was a mistake. If it wasn't a mistake this discovery would have been fortunate and we should be glad we got to know how wrong we were. But now we know that most what we think we know wasn't false but is correct. Also, stuff going faster than the speed of light gives arguably 'ugly' physics. We are better off in a universe were such a thing is not possible. So on every level it was unfortunate. It is better to not make a mistake. It is better to not have everything you know be wrong. It is better to have a more consistent and rigid reality where there is the speed of lght that limits stuff with no exceptions. It is only unfortunate for the scientists involved. I also predictecd they would be shamed. But then other people felt to comment that they were just doing good science and that discovering you are wrong is also good. Yeah well, it doesn't really work like that in practice. Basically they learned nothing new about the universe. What they learned is that humans made mistake and they messed up their experiment so they got useless results that didn't tell them anything about physics. I told everyone this was a mistake from the start, but no one would really believe it. I told them most physicists didn't believe it. But no what people in the media believed was more important to them. | ||
|
Poffel
471 Posts
On February 23 2012 15:29 GGTeMpLaR wrote: Well, technically, Einsteinian physics can never be proven wrong in the sense that it will be totally falsified, just like Newtonian physics is not really "falsified", and even if it could be, one experiment sure as well wouldn't be enough to do it. Coming up with a better alternative theory that immediately has more theoretical predictive power and ends up having more empirical predictive power, that's the true gold medal. Sorry, but that statement doesn't mean anything. Truth really has little to nothing to do with an instrumentalist comparsion of theories according to their predictive power, Given enough epicycles, you could predict the cinematics of the nightsky according to Ptolemy's theory... that still doesn't mean that it's not totally falsified that the sun orbits the earth. | ||
|
Klockan3
Sweden2866 Posts
On February 23 2012 19:35 Miyoshino wrote: It is better to not make a mistake. It is better to not have everything you know be wrong. It is better to have a more consistent and rigid reality where there is the speed of lght that limits stuff with no exceptions. Why do you say this? Would the world be better off without relativity theory and quantum mechanics? Because you could use exactly the same arguments for that. Notice that if the world was purely newtonian we would never get computers so it would suck. The same thing for this case, when you discover a phenomena previously thought impossible it is possible that it can be used to create wonderful new applications. This is the reason physics is funded, if we happened to get an exception to the special relativity rule it would be the most exciting thing that happened in physics during the past 50 years. | ||
|
Miyoshino
314 Posts
We would have to start from scratch. Making progress and discovering our current theories have no value are two different things. Therefore, it can't be compared with the progress after Newtonian mechanics. | ||
|
Klockan3
Sweden2866 Posts
On February 23 2012 19:47 Miyoshino wrote: Right now we build all our electronics based on QM. If we know it is all bullshit, how do we build our computers? We would be building all this stuff but having no clue why it works. That's really really bad even if somehow it magically does work. We would have to start from scratch. Making progress and discovering our current theories have no value are two different things. Therefore, it can't be compared with the progress after Newtonian mechanics. Plenty of people still utilize newtonian physics even today, why would we have to revise everything just because we realized that in some special case it isn't holding up? Also, we already know that it isn't holding up in all cases, physics is currently broken but the theories works well enough in certain special cases that we haven't been able to come up with an experiment to disprove them. The reason it is hard to currently further physics is the lack of experiments that disproves current physics. | ||
|
Miyoshino
314 Posts
The result of something just being able to go straight out faster than light, no tricks used, strikes at the fountation of all at science. Even Newtonian science shouldn't work if it were true. This is one of the reasons why people never believed it. If we found out it was really true today, then tomorrow we would live in a world were every computer on the world was broken and malfunctioning. The fact that they don't is again part of why no one really believed this claim. But if it were correct this would have to be the case. Even things like conservation of energy go out of the window. Science is build like an unside down pyramid. Things you think you know you keep using to get to the next level. If someone like f=ma is wrong, then every experiment done the last 100 years is wrong because they all assumed f=ma . So in a sense yes it would mean our computers are consistently malfunctioning. How we don't notice it today has to be explained. Maybe we blamed then on bugs or something. Trying to tweak the electronics would only make the problem worse since we just accidentally hit a sweet spot that mysteriously works as if MQ were true. So literally it would mean we don't know how to build computers anymore, with no obvious solution. Same has to be true for other things like GPS. And this also means that the result of this experiment is unreliable anyway since it assumes MQ and relativity are true in the first place. It would be different if neutrinos only went faster than the speed of light using a trick. Also, neutrinos could have been an exception. Then yes, other parts of physics should be able to hold. But this is all just strange speculation. The problem is that this experiment was a mistake. A measurement that was just extremely odd. This is different from discovering something new. Finding a new force or new particle are interesting things. Even if they demand we revise our old theories. The reason why assuming this experiment's results were right gives so much problems and thus can't be the case is because it was a mistake in the first place. Therefore, it makes no sense to do so. Also, there are plenty of gaps in our current models. The reason we have so little new discoveries is because it gets harder and harder to make them. You need bigger particle colliders and bigger space telescopes. If you want to find out everything, you need one as big as the visible universe. Disproving current theories is not how progress is made. Progress is made when you find new things. Like the period where we were finding new fundamental particles every week. At this point we have been looking for the higgs boson for a long time and we can't seem to nail it. And at the same time we have kind of a fictional science in string theory. This is actually not true science but a kind of physolophy since there is no experimental confirmation. It is not like we have a dozen theories that all seem to be able to explain the universe equally well and now we have to figure out which ones are wrong. We have only one we think is right but at crucial points we can't find confirmation. | ||
|
nihlon
Sweden5581 Posts
On February 23 2012 19:35 Miyoshino wrote: No it isn't. This was a mistake. If it wasn't a mistake this discovery would have been fortunate and we should be glad we got to know how wrong we were. But now we know that most what we think we know wasn't false but is correct. Also, stuff going faster than the speed of light gives arguably 'ugly' physics. We are better off in a universe were such a thing is not possible. So on every level it was unfortunate. It is better to not make a mistake. It is better to not have everything you know be wrong. It is better to have a more consistent and rigid reality where there is the speed of lght that limits stuff with no exceptions. It is only unfortunate for the scientists involved. I also predictecd they would be shamed. But then other people felt to comment that they were just doing good science and that discovering you are wrong is also good. Yeah well, it doesn't really work like that in practice. Basically they learned nothing new about the universe. What they learned is that humans made mistake and they messed up their experiment so they got useless results that didn't tell them anything about physics. I told everyone this was a mistake from the start, but no one would really believe it. I told them most physicists didn't believe it. But no what people in the media believed was more important to them. You learn from your mistakes, it actually works like that in practise... No research that tries to discover the unknown can avoid mistakes. Yes, this whole thing was blown out of proportion but if you assume every weird finding is wrong just because you don't believe in it, that's when you are doing bad research. They couldn't find an answer right away so they went public, which was probably their biggest mistake. | ||
|
Condor
Netherlands188 Posts
On February 23 2012 20:45 nihlon wrote: You learn from your mistakes, it actually works like that in practise... No research that tries to discover the unknown can avoid mistakes. Yes, this whole thing was blown out of proportion but if you assume every weird finding is wrong just because you don't believe in it, that's when you are doing bad research. They couldn't find an answer right away so they went public, which was probably their biggest mistake. Nope, that was what they were supposed to do. If you can't find a mistake or an answer, you present what you have. Don't censor yourself, explain what you see, how you measured etc. They never publicly interpreted their results, they always treated them as though they had to still figure out what was going on. But after months of testing, you should go public. Stuff like this happens, good for them they found the error, instead of the verification (by MINOS) showing the error first. | ||
|
NeMeSiS3
Canada2972 Posts
| ||
| ||
