Second test of faster than light neutrinos confirmed

[Old Rocks]

Interesting how the posts on this demonstrate the three attitudes toward science.

1. See, I told you them scientists were stupid all along!

2. Hmmm.... And how does this change the big picture of the way the universe works?

3. What can I do with this?

The third, the engineering attitude drives those of the first category batty, because the answers involve ineviteble change to the world and society.

Those of the second attitude are already working on something, whether they know it or not, that will supercede the newest discoveries.

 

[waltky]

Dat's what Uncle Ferd been sayin' all along but nobody would lissen to him...

Speed of Light May Not be Constant
March 26th, 2013 - The speed of light has long been calculated to be 299,792.458 km per second, but now new research from France and Germany indicates that light may not travel at a fixed rate after all, but instead can fluctuate.

A key component of Einstein’s famous E=MC2, the speed of light has been thought to be finite since 1676 after Danish astronomer Ole Rømer first established his findings while studying the motion of Jupiter’s moon Io. Two separate studies by scientists from the University of Paris-Sud in France and from the Max Planck Institutes for the Physics of Light in Germany are disputing the long established belief concerning the nature of a vacuum.

Researcher Marcel Urban and his colleagues in France said they had identified a “quantum level mechanism” for understanding vacuum. Urban’s research indicates that a vacuum is not completely empty as long thought, but instead filled with pairs of virtual or ephemeral particles with varying levels of energy. Because of this, Urban asserts that since the characteristics of a vacuum fluctuate, the speed of light then must also vary as well.

Danish astronomer Ole Rømer

Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, in their forthcoming paper for the Max Planck Institutes, are suggesting that certain physical constants (physical quantities with values that are thought to be universal in nature and remain unchanged over time) indicate that there are also a number of elementary particles in nature, including those that might be found in a vacuum. The physical constants they speak of could include properties such as the speed of light and another that’s known as the “impedance of free space” (varying levels of the electric and magnetic fields of electromagnetic radiation traveling through free space).

Physicists have long found that the concept of the vacuum is one of the most fascinating issues in their field of science. A vacuum, when viewed at the quantum level – at the smallest and most basic level – is not empty, but instead filled with particle pairs such as electron-positron or quark-antiquark pairs that are constantly appearing and disappearing. While these particle pairs are real particles, their lifetimes are extremely short. If these findings are proved to be true, they could have an impact on current scientific theories that take the speed of light into consideration. Both studies will be published in an upcoming edition of the European Physical Journal – D (EPJ-D).

Source

 

[numan]

Urban’s research indicates that a vacuum is not completely empty as long thought, but instead filled with pairs of virtual or ephemeral particles with varying levels of energy. Because of this, Urban asserts that since the characteristics of a vacuum fluctuate, the speed of light then must also vary as well.

That doesn't make any sense whatever, and must, charitably, be considered a garbled report. The existence of virtual particles in the vacuum has long been well-established in standard physics -- in fact, the most accurately measured quantity in all of physics, up to now, is based on the effects caused by vacuum virtual particles on the magnetic moment of elementary particles (a factor of 1.001159652180[76] for the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron).

The physical constants they speak of could include properties such as the speed of light and another that’s known as the “impedance of free space” (varying levels of the electric and magnetic fields of electromagnetic radiation traveling through free space).

That also, as it stands, is nonsense. The "impedance of free space" -- better known as the "permittivity" of the vacuum -- along with its magnetic counterpart, the "permeability" of the vacuum, are not physical constants, but rather are conversion terms between different systems of electromagnetic measurement. In the Gaussian system, they are even dimensionless, being simply the number "1"!

Physicists have long found that the concept of the vacuum is one of the most fascinating issues in their field of science. A vacuum, when viewed at the quantum level – at the smallest and most basic level – is not empty, but instead filled with particle pairs such as electron-positron or quark-antiquark pairs that are constantly appearing and disappearing.

That, at least is true, but directly contradicts what was written in the first paragraph!!

What a dog's breakfast this report is!!
.

 

[waltky]

Discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation has upended scientific thinking...

Nobel Prize for solving puzzle of elusive neutrino particles
Tue Oct 6, 2015 - A Japanese and a Canadian scientist won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for discovering that elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass, opening a new window onto the fundamental nature of the universe.

Neutrinos are the second most bountiful particles after photons, the particles of light, with trillions of them streaming through our bodies every second, but their true nature has been poorly understood. Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald's breakthrough was the discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation that has upended scientific thinking and promises to change understanding about the history and future fate of the cosmos. “It is a discovery that will change the books in physics, so it is really major discovery,” Barbro Asman, a Nobel committee member and professor of physics at Stockholm University, told Reuters. In awarding the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the finding had "changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe".

For many years, the central enigma with neutrinos was that up to two-thirds fewer of them were detected on Earth than expected. Kajita and McDonald, using different experiments, managed to explain this around the turn of the millennium by showing that neutrinos actually changed identities, or "flavors", and therefore must have some mass, however small. McDonald told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone that this not only gave scientists a more complete understanding of the world at a fundamental level but could also shed light on the science behind fusion power, which drives the Sun and could one day be tapped as a source of electricity on Earth. "Yes, there certainly was a Eureka moment in this experiment when we were able to see that neutrinos appeared to change from one type to the other in traveling from the Sun to the Earth," he said.

Kajita is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at University of Tokyo, while McDonald is professor Emeritus at Queen’s University in Canada. The 8 million Swedish crown ($962,000) physics prize is the second of this year's Nobels. Previous winners of the physics prize have included Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Marie Curie. The prizes were first awarded in 1901 to honor achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and business tycoon Alfred Nobel. The prize for medicine was awarded on Monday to three scientists for their work in developing drugs to fight parasitic diseases including malaria and elephantiasis.

Nobel Prize for solving puzzle of elusive neutrino particles

 

[Two Thumbs]

it's interesting to learn that an object could be moving faster than light.

since we want to travel to distant world and get back, moving faster than light is a must, but basically suicide for any on board, until now, maybe.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Interesting how the posts on this demonstrate the three attitudes toward science.

1. See, I told you them scientists were stupid all along!

2. Hmmm.... And how does this change the big picture of the way the universe works?

3. What can I do with this?

The third, the engineering attitude drives those of the first category batty, because the answers involve ineviteble change to the world and society.

Those of the second attitude are already working on something, whether they know it or not, that will supercede the newest discoveries.

I thought that the speed of light was "settled science

Dafuq

Is the only remaining constant in all of science the "fact" that a wisp of CO2 will cause floods, forest fires, droughts, record snow and cold, end snow as we know it and record heat?

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Nothing naturally occuring travels faster than light. Only quasi-exception being the rate of expansion in the early universe. The neutrinos exceeding light thing is explained and debunked here. If not fluent in Deep Geek though don't bother. Gave me a headache just looking at it.

A neutrino has rest-mass and travels at (near) $c$, why isn't its mass/ energy (nearly) infinite?

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Interesting how the posts on this demonstrate the three attitudes toward science.

1. See, I told you them scientists were stupid all along!

2. Hmmm.... And how does this change the big picture of the way the universe works?

3. What can I do with this?

The third, the engineering attitude drives those of the first category batty, because the answers involve ineviteble change to the world and society.

Those of the second attitude are already working on something, whether they know it or not, that will supercede the newest discoveries.

The speed of light may have hit an rr, speed bump, but all we know for certain is that some as yet undetermined amount of CO2 will cause fires, floods, earthquakes, kill Oysters and cause man-made climate global change warming

The science is settled

 

[waltky]

... neutrinos may have protected us all from complete annihilation...

The Latest: Research changed the course of particle physics
Oct 6,`15 -- Latest developments in the announcements of the Nobel Prizes (all times local):

5 p.m.

Discoveries by the Nobel physics laureates have bolstered the notion that neutrinos may have protected us all from complete annihilation by tilting the balance between matter and antimatter, said Hitoshi Murayama, director of the Kavli Institute for the Physcis and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He said Takaaki Kajita and his co-awardee Arthur McDonald discovered that neutrinos have tiny amount of mass, making that theory "very plausible." "Clearly, Kajita's work changed the direction of research in particle physics worldwide," he said. Physics has become something of a specialty for Japan. Of the country's 24 Nobel laureates, 11 have won the physics prize.

4:25 p.m.

Guido Drexlin, a neutrino expert at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, recalls the day Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita presented his findings to the science world, in 1998. "There were about 500 scientists, young and old, and after the presentation the whole room was on its feet," Drexlin told the AP. "It was like a rock concert. I've never experienced anything before or after, that results were celebrated so enthusiastically at a science conference." Drexlin said Kajita's discovery revolutionized the field of neutrino science, including his own work.

Workers stand in front of a big spectrometer which is the heart of the tritium-neutrino- experiment at the research center of Karlruhe in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen.​

While Kajita and fellow laureate Arthur McDonald discovered that different types of neutrino have a different mass, they have only been able to determine the difference relative to each type. "Neutrinos are a million times lighter than an electron, which is a charged version of a neutrino," said Drexlin. Determining the absolute weight of neutrinos is something his team at the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment, or KATRIN, hopes to start working on next year. Drexlin said while most particles get their mass from the Higgs boson - whose discovery led to a Nobel prize two years ago - some scientists believe the neutrino gets its mass from another, as yet undiscovered particle.

3:10 p.m.

 

[waltky]

University Of Pennsylvania scientists contributed Nobel Prize winning research...

Penn scientists' work on 'ghost particles' contributed to Nobel win
Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - They are among the most numerous particles in the universe, subatomic ghosts silently whizzing through our bodies millions of times a second. And yet physicists were mystified as to why two-thirds of these particles, called neutrinos, seemed to be missing in action.

This year's Nobel Prize in physics is going to a pair of scientists from Canada and Japan who discovered what was really happening, the prize committee announced Tuesday. The project led by the Canadian scientist, deep inside a nickel mine near Sudbury, Ontario, got a big assist from the University of Pennsylvania. The team of several hundred researchers and technicians included more than a dozen from Penn, who helped design and build high-tech particle detectors and analyzed the results, first published in 2001. The findings from both the Canadian and Japanese groups revealed that neutrinos, once thought to be massless, in fact have a small amount of mass - calling into question fundamental theories about the interaction of matter. (Make that a very small amount of mass. An electron is millions of times heavier than a neutrino.)

With further research on neutrinos and their subatomic kin, scientists expect to improve their understanding of such cosmic mysteries as exploding stars and the formation of the universe. The prize will be awarded in Stockholm on Dec. 10 to Arthur B. McDonald of Queen's University in Canada, who led the project in the nickel mine, and Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo, who led experiments in a Japanese zinc mine. Why mines? The thousands of feet of rock act as a shield against cosmic radiation that would interfere with the scientists' measurements deep underground. Neutrinos, on the other hand, can slip right through. In the Canadian mine, the neutrinos were detected by measuring their interactions with molecules of "heavy" water, in a giant plastic tank built 6,800 feet beneath the surface.

Penn physics professor Josh Klein, one of the team members, recalled plunging deep into the earth inside a cagelike elevator, accompanied by miners. "I spent a large part of two years going down every day, for eight to 10 hours," Klein said Tuesday. The air pressure that far beneath the surface is noticeably higher, said fellow Penn physics professor Eugene Beier, another key team member. "It's something that you don't do with a stuffed-up head," Beier said.

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