--- On Fri, 9/23/11, Horace Heffner <hheff...@mtaonline.net> wrote:
> This measurement conflicts with early arrival time data for > neutrinos from supernova. The New Scientist article quotes > Marc Sher of the College of William and Mary in > Williamsburg, Virginia, "It's not reasonable." ... "If > neutrinos were that much faster than light, they would have > arrived [from the supernova] five years sooner, which is > crazy," says Sher. "They didn't." AFAIK, Sher wouldn't know this. Kamiokande I came online in 1983, Kamiokande II in 85. SN1987A obviously happened in 1987, so how he gets 5 years as being impossible makes no sense to me. If no neutrino detector existed 5 years prior, then he doesn't know. This also assumes that the neutrinos produced in SN1987A would have traveled at exactly the same speed greater than C as those produced at CERN. That's a big assumption. A supernova obviously has a /slightly/ greater power output than a human-made collider. For all anyone knows, the things could have been traveling at, oh, let's say 1.1C. If so, given SN1987A's distance of 168,000ly, the neutrino surge would have hit about 15,000 years ago. Someone should consult the Cro-Magnon Journal of Applied Sciences for a note of this event. Assuming (why not?) that neutrinos produced under different conditions may travel at different speeds, possibly exceeding C, there is no way to say that unexplained detection events at the neutrino observatories are not the result of supernovae. With no real directional capability of the observatories, there is no clear way to correlate known supernova remnants with neutrino events. Sher is assuming a hell of a lot too much. He's sounding a lot like the folks that observed Venus, saw nothing, and assumed that there must be dinosaurs. Or at least an ocean of seltzer. Now, the article goes on to say that maybe the neutrinos did some funny travel through another dimension, and arrived at the destination sooner by taking a shortcut. So, no, they never really traveled faster than light. This is quite possibly one of the stupidest things I've ever read. If you crack open Taylor and Wheeler, do a few space-time diagrams, you will find that it DOES NOT MATTER whether the thing took a shortcut through the dimension of "somebody else's problem" via bistromathics; from our point of view, the thing traveled at a global speed defined by V = D / t, and since the arrival at position D = x (with the origin being defined as D = 0) took place at time t < x / c, it still went faster than light as far as special relativity is concerned. Period. Owing to relativity of simultaneity, you will then have reference frames which will see the arrival (or 'appearance' if we use Sher's idea of skipping the distance) of the neutrinos at position x as having happened before they were generated in the first place. Causality violation. And if you want to switch reference frames in some inventive ways, you can get a nice paradox going on with the neutrinos arriving back at the destination before they ever were formed. This isn't an answer by postulating another dimension, it's just poking at a large bulldog who happens to be named Occam. Maybe, just to be nice, Sher assumes the neutrinos travelled perpendicular to the circular circuit. But you don't need another dimension to do that. You do, however, need a way to appease the gods of momentum conservation. One of the things I find real funny about this whole "you can't go FTL, it violates physics and grah-rawr-hiss-spit-blah-roflcopter" is that in the scientific literature, you will find plenty of papers published giving potential ways (theoretical, of course!) of constructing time machines. But the minute you talk about having a spaceship move faster than the speed of light, well, you're in big trouble, because you can't do that. It would cause time travel! Which you... just... published a... ...paper on... yeah. Why I chose the term textus receptus in the subject line is sort of convoluted, but bear with me. The textus receptus or "received text" is said by probably a majority of modern Christian believers to be the inerrant word of God. The proof of this is that the textus receptus says so, therefore it is so, because it says so. Ad tedium, ad infinatum, ad nauseam. Which is more or less what modern physical theory is, when you get down to the more esoteric stuff. It is this way, because it is this way. It's remarks like Sher's that underscore the point. Like an apologetic, they will go to any length to avoid something that is uncomfortable to look in the eye, even to the point of /going right to what they wanted to avoid but naming it something else/. You see the same thing in regards to so-called LENR. You can't do it, no way, the textus receptus says no. But if it happens, well, ignore it as long as you can, and if you can't any more, just call it something else and say a few Hail Alberts, and sin no more my son. Higgs loves you, and forgives you. The Higgs is another thing we get from scientific textus receptus; it's got a grand name. The God particle. Nice name, since it... ...HAS to be there, the text says so! ...is damn hard to find... ...isn't there when you need it, but is there to cause inertia if you need to be punished for the sin of trying to build a reactionless engine... ...is ever elusive. If you can't find it there, no problem, you will find an apologetic to help you regain your faith in it again. It just had a different energy. You need to have more faith, my son. No, I am not trying to offend the religious among us. I am just trying to point out that, as with so many things, human tendencies are just as present in science as they are in religion. And, for better or for worse, they really aren't that different. It all really boils down to your chosen belief, and if you don't think that's true, well, I guess you haven't been shocked quite enough by quantum mechanics. Apologies to saint Bohr. Here's another one. Wormholes used for time travel. Assuming you can make a wormhole, or that anyone can even agree on what the thing is, it's been regurgitated a thousand times that you can use one as a time machine. Just spin the far end of it around at close to the speed of light, and time dilation will take place, and so you can come out earlier, and so on, and so on, and so on, and you get it, it's great. Alright, you're swinging around this big mouth at relativistic speed. Which part is dilated, and which part does your hypothetical spaceship 'couple to' when it exits? Why does your ship automatically take on the date of the exit when it flies out? Is there something special about the mechanical contraption doing the moving, or keeping the opening from collapsing? Or is it the reference frame of the space forming the exit? What is it's reference frame? Why isn't it the same as that of the wormhole throat? Why can't we simplify things, and say that since the throat is made of the same 'stuff' (space) as the exits are, that they all have the same frame of reference? Well, you can't do that, because if you did, absolute simultaneity would be back in the picture, relativity would fail, and we would have... ...no problem with neutrinos, or anything else moving faster than light. ...no more time paradoxes that can't be explained. ...something that maybe correlates with the background radiation. ...no energy conservation violations from any possible future 'reactionless' engines, should they exist. ...a physical substance of some kind providing the basic framework for mediation of forces, something real to 'curve', ala general relativity, and so on. It should be pointed out that there are formulations of relativistic transforms (Tangherlini, Selleri, etc.) which allow some form of absolute reference frame, and therefore absolute simultaneity. There is a distinct 'past' and 'future'. These various formulations are indistinguishable from conventional special relativity up to C. Above C, they give wildly different predictions; with special relativity, you run into causality violations. If an assumed absolute frame is present, these do not happen, you simply arrive quicker, but the speed in different directions is varied. It would be, I think, an interesting experiment, if possible, to measure the speed of these (if they are) superluminal neutrinos at various times of year, or with travel paths oriented in particular directions. Points of interest might be in the constellations Leo/Crater, Aquarius, Octans, and in the vicinity of Ursa Major. I am speculating based on our apparent motion WRT the CMBR. Well, this went too long. Now I've probably got the scientific community and the religious community mad at me, heretic that I am. I guess I had better go back to hell, where the population is always growing, and the only things conserved are mass, charge, and angular momentum. --K Postscript: maybe the real reason the idea of FTL is so hated is simply because scientists do not want plastic-light-saber wielding fanboys parading around outside LANL.
