---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
Re "Faster than light they must be relativistically moving backwards in time.":
This stuff is beyond my pay grade but I understand that talk of backwards time
travel is based on the "light cone" - zones in our past are "now" outside the
ability of a light signal to reach us (see below).
However, if neutrinos can exceed light speed then maybe that just means the
angle at the cone's tip should be larger . . ?
If that is not the case and neutrinos can send signals back into the past then
ponder this:
A mad scientist sets up an experiment in which a neutrino beam sends a signal
into the past (say one second before). If a receiver picks up the signal sent
from one second in the future it immediately shuts down the transmitter so
ensuring that no signal will ever be sent.
Mindfcuk.
A contradiction.
A contradiction in *reality*!
That's the funny thing about the "sum over histories" interpretation of
quantum theory, we could do a Shrodinger's cat type experiment that has two
outcomes in the same universe. This must mean that it's possible - to use
Feynman's analogy - that you could apply for a job and both get it and not get
it as all particles behave in an entangled way. So it's possible that you could
meet someone who remembers you getting the job when you didn't get it. The
chances of that are rather small though, hard to imagine a less likely bet but
apparently it's possible so fundamental contradictions could happen.
Reality may be - but most likely isn't - a lot stranger than we suppose. As
Douglas Adams observed, if the universe ground to a halt because one bit of it
looked at another bit and said "That doesn't make sense" it would have got past
the first nanosecond...
I'm not sure if you could ever do such an experiment with a neutrino as the
start travelling faster than light, this must make them slippery customers in
an experimental sense because they are long gone before you switch on the
measurement device - or even think of it if they are far enough away - but
doesn't the principle of wave like duality means that if you did a double-slit
experiment with them you'd end up without a counter-intuitive interference
pattern?
One rationalisation of the interference problem states that the everything in
the subatomic world moves backwards in time thus solving the problem, but that
adds another level of explanation as to why we appear to be moving forwards so
I suspect we can ditch that idea.
Help! The manifold of space-time is starting to unravel.
I think that's just my brain...In an infinite universe, anything permitted by
the laws of physics has already happened an infinite number of times.
Is anyone out there?
The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking for other Earth type planets and
the spread of dense matter when compared to the amount of devastating
supernovae in the early universe means that ours might be one of the first
planets capable of bearing life as we know it. This is a good solution to the
Fermi paradox - that we must be alone because no aliens have visited us yet -
they simply haven't evolved beyond the level we have.
The team estimate there are possibly a trillion Earth type worlds in the
galaxy though. Do all of them ponder the same sort of things in the same sort
of way, or is it possible our maths and way of constructing our experiments
limit our understanding by pushing us into a cone of ever decreasing
explanations we are doomed to call reality thus missing the bigger picture
altogether?
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than
light.
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said
that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near
Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light
would have done.
"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for
anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he
said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of
special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant"
and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
That's interesting, as are neutrinos themselves. If I recall correctly, they
are forged as a byproduct of nuclear fusion inside stars, the first odd thing
about them is that they start travelling faster than light speed so they
side-step the problem with acceleration. They are also massless which means
they avoid having infinite mass - having none to start with - this also helps
avoid destroying the universe as there are rather a lot of them. A few billion
neutrinos from the sun pass through every square inch of your skin every second.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about them is that if they really are
travelling faster than light they must be relativistically moving backwards in
time. This is because time slows down for the observer as you get close to
light speed and stops when you reach it (not that you can) but anything going
faster is - compared to our time frame - going backwards.
This has been used as a plot device in hard sci-fi for decades, astrophysicist
Gregory Benford wrote his Timescape novel featuring communication from the
future via neutrino beams, as did John Carpenter in his movie Prince of
Darkness (it was far and away the best bit of the film)..
So the question is, how come these guys at CERN didn't know this? Do they not
read sci-fi or was Benford's book transmitted back through time as a publicity
stunt? Perhaps it was pure theory until now and they are justifiably excited in
being able to prove it?
Interesting stuff, but Einstein is safe, for now....
