Thread : In the news today

[Count de Money]

^^^ So the dream of traveling at warp speed may be technically possible after all! Suck it, Einsteinian physics!

[Radbaron]

Newtonian physics.

[Don Alexander]

Einsteinian physics.

Newtonian physics has absolute time and thus unlimited speed of light.

[Lord Styphon]

This is the Star Trek technology that tells Newtonian physics to suck it.

[Iceman]

I thought, Don, that the Newtonian physics had a limited speed of light that still could be surpassed if you put enough energy into your own speed (or acceleration, whichever is supposed to be there, I'm no physicist).

Always, you learn something new.

[Don Alexander]

Okay, my formulation was misleading. Kind of... An absolute time frame is only possible if you have an unlimited transmission speed for signals. Such signals are usually propagated through electromagnetic fields, either directly via light or via EM forces in matter. Of course, back then it was not known that EM fields exist (electricity, yes. Magnetism, yes. Maxwell's equations linking both and leading to light as a solution in vacuum? No.), and while it WAS known that light has a high but finite speed (don't recall the details anymore, but they measured it via the moons of Jupiter), the whole special relativity stuff was not yet known and no link was made between light speed and the behaviour of time at high speeds.

[Gil Hamilton]

The neutrinos going faster than the legal limit smells like systematic problems in the experiment to me and I'm sure the guys at CERN agree. Catching anything, let alone something with a small but measurable mass, going faster than light means that physicists are going to have to entirely go back to the drawing board, because there big considerations that require the speed of light to be invariant. Those physics who published that result are right now taking their experiment down to the bare bones to figure out where precisely that their experiment was flawed and probably are hoping that they have.

As a person on another message board put it, this is getting a lot of play for this reason:

Here is to hopping that Einstein will not crush the dreams of space opera and sci-fi nerds everywhere until the end of time.

It's kind of funny that so many people consider relativity to be a boot stomping on the face of all science fiction fans, forever.

There is probably a logical reason for this though and it doesn't involve FTL particles. We need to get back to important things, like arguing over whether those observed tiny variations in measurement of the fine structure constant are real, even though their error bars contain the actual expected value for alpha.

[Radbaron]

I'm wondering if it is a simple measurement error on the distance between the two sites. The smallest mistake on measuring over 700 kms could very well skew the data.

In other news..... are you wearing your crash helmet today?

UARS Tracking === may take time to load, servers are busy for some odd reason

http://www.n2yo.com/uars-decay/ <=== NASA updates on UARS orbits.

[Don Alexander]

Nothing loading... Wonder why...

If I go offline and don't come back, you know why!

EDIT: On the Neutrinos faster than light thingy:

In 1987, the nearest visible supernova in several hundred years occured, SN 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Just hours before the SN was discovered visually, a detector in Japan registered the neutrino signal of the explosion. So the neutrinos and the optical light arrived within just hours of each other. I should note that the neutrinos can escape the dying star immediately, signaling the moment of "core collapse", whereas the visual explosion is not seen until some hours of so afterward, the shockwave takes time to break out of the star. So it's expected for the neutrinos to get there a bit faster, even if they travel a small fraction below light speed.

If they were 60 ns / 732 km faster than light...

they would have arrived 1670 DAYS earlier.

So, suck on that.

[Gil Hamilton]

This seems relevant to the above

[JVDifferent]

Hey, anyone here live in New York? Apparently there have been some enormous, indefinite, peaceful protests in Wall Street, for about nine days now. The mainstream media has been absurdly quiet about it.

[Tenjen]

Saw some people getting arrested on our news concerning that

[Searcher]

Fools, they should be marching on Washinton DC; most of the problems start there and live in both the White House as well as halls of Congress. Don't believe me read the tax code.

[yiraheerai]

There's a facebook page devoted to spreading the news. A lot of protest pictures. They're planning something in Portland, apparently.

['J']

yeah, the activist crowd has been planning that for months, i remember the initial article calling for it and how it romanticized the whole idea of being tired and hungry and getting arrested for one's beliefs.

Fools, they should be marching on Washinton DC; most of the problems start there and live in both the White House as well as halls of Congress. Don't believe me read the tax code.

well see, that's the thing. if they actually wanted to make a difference they'd do things like go to law school or run for public office, but stuff like this isn't really about accomplishing anything it's about feeling like they've accomplished something. now having preformed their big and flashy spectacle of a protest they can feel all smugly superior to the 'sellouts' who are actually working to improve things from the inside.

useless fucking hippies.