posted
I'm leaning towards it will. This is really serious stuff, and it stabs at the heart of an entire branch of science.
edit: It'd be like everyone in the world hearing a voice in their heads say, "This is God, Jesus was not actually my son."
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: I'm leaning towards it will.
Based on what?
Science is not made in newspaper headlines.
I just said based on what. I'm sure they've reviewed their findings many times, as they indicated they have. And now they are willingly forwarding their findings for review. You usually do that when you are confident either the data holds up, or nobody will figure out where you cheated.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: I'm leaning towards it will.
Based on what?
Science is not made in newspaper headlines.
I just said based on what. I'm sure they've reviewed their findings many times, as they indicated they have. And now they are willingly forwarding their findings for review. You usually do that when you are confident either the data holds up, or nobody will figure out where you cheated.
The vastly more likely outcome is that the results are, for some reason, not what they appear to be. The peer reviewing process gives hundreds of people the opportunity to find a reason why this result is not reliable. Which again, they most likely will.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: The vastly more likely outcome is that the results are, for some reason, not what they appear to be. The peer reviewing process gives hundreds of people the opportunity to find a reason why this result is not reliable. Which again, they most likely will.
Indeed. And in any case, the validity or lack of same won't be determined by newspaper headlines.
(Seriously, am I the only one old enough to remember the rapturous headlines when tabletop cold fusion was supposedly discovered in 1989? It only took a couple months that time to crush the wild claims of cheap energy.)
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: The vastly more likely outcome is that the results are, for some reason, not what they appear to be. The peer reviewing process gives hundreds of people the opportunity to find a reason why this result is not reliable. Which again, they most likely will.
Indeed. And in any case, the validity or lack of same won't be determined by newspaper headlines.
(Seriously, am I the only one old enough to remember the rapturous headlines when tabletop cold fusion was supposedly discovered in 1989? It only took a couple months that time to crush the wild claims of cheap energy.)
I'm not sure who you think is dancing in the streets cheering for FTL spaceships. There's a difference between two university professors, and a team of scientists working at CERN.
I completely accept it might turn out that they just goofed, and didn't carry the one, but I'm also hopeful they are right. The speed of light is a barrier, and knowing it can be broken is an essential precursor to busting it. It's fun to see our understanding of the universe expand. But I don't see anybody here saying, "Lols at Einstein."
posted
(Although I somewhat agree with rivka's sentiment, I'm not sure I remember *any* headlines in 1989 first hand. Looking in wiki, we're talking the era of David Peterson (Ontario Premier), the third season of TNG, or the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (not NAFTA, the other one).
If I try really really hard, I think I somewhat remember being taken to Star Trek V)
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
I'm also betting that this finding will be found to be experimental error. It appears they've seen similar anomalies from the same sort of experiment before.
This finding would really break physics as we know it (unless, as one scientist quoted, it is compatible with one of the string theories). Things like the Higgs boson, or a new family of particles at a strange energy band would be cooler.
Posts: 7021 | Registered: Nov 1999
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quote: But I don't see anybody here saying, "Lols at Einstein."
There are actually a not insignificant number of people literally using this event to say that it shows that science is untrustworthy and keeps 'changing its mind' and shouldn't be considered more credible or testable as their religion. Basically, today's latest mirror of the 'holes in science' estimation used to show that things like the geological age of the earth, presence of evolutionary species division, global warming theory, big bang, etc., are all just agenda-based 'secular religion'
HOWEVER this time I was so unsurprised that I didn't even bat an eyelash at it.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I remember cold fusion. Was that really 1989?!
I don't see how such a discovery, if really true, would harm science itself. It might upend a lot of theory previously thought to be solid as stone, but isn't that just part of the process?
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
What a mess this article is. No specifics at all.
How did they detect the precise location of a neutrino? Neutrinos are extremely difficult to interact with. Most neutrino detectors are building-sized underground tanks of water.
How do they know it was the same neutrino? Neutrinos are everywhere, all the time, in extremely dense quantities.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: There's a difference between two university professors, and a team of scientists working at CERN.
Not as much as you think. And they were not just any two professors; they really were well-known and well-respected (one more than the other, but even so). The work was initially seen as brilliant and revolutionary -- the government wanted to throw money at them, industry wanted to throw money at them. It was the culmination of years of research. Being CERN (or not) is not magic.
But anyway, that's NOT the point.
The point is: an announcement or press release and the coverage it generates is essentially irrelevant to the actual science. (Not irrelevant to raising money for doing science, but that's something else altogether.) Claims that they wouldn't make an announcement if they weren't really, really sure ignore decades of previous announcements. They also ignore how the PR segments of research institutes work, and the degree to which they can push announcements (and often do) long before researchers feel they have something worth announcing.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I don't know. A few months back there was an article saying that they think the laws of physics are different in other parts of the universe. More research has to be done on it, but if true I wouldn't rule out light being one of the laws of physics that can be bent.
I'm extremely hopeful it pans out. The article I read made it seem like they had run thousands of tests with the same results and only releasing the information now. I don't think it was an isolated incident.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: It appears they've seen similar anomalies from the same sort of experiment before.
Yes. There was also another "we have measured information traveling faster than light! oops, ok, not exactly" hooplah a couple years back.
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posted
This one is a bit better, since their margin of error in measurement doesn't include the speed of light (unlike the previous one).
Obviously there are lots of possible errors, but one likely one is that they got the distance between points wrong. If they're over by 15 meters or more, the speed of light suddenly becomes within their margin of error.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:The point is: an announcement or press release and the coverage it generates is essentially irrelevant to the actual science.
especially when the press coverage likes to compress "Tests at this juncture have provided a report initially indicating X" into "X achieved!"
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posted
"We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote:Originally posted by advice for robots: I remember cold fusion. Was that really 1989?!
I don't see how such a discovery, if really true, would harm science itself. It might upend a lot of theory previously thought to be solid as stone, but isn't that just part of the process?
It is. But for people primed in the sort of thinking that a fair number of churches encourage in their members, a discovery that you may be wrong about a conclusion science has made is in itself an admission of some flaw in the scientific process, because it originally led you to that earlier wrong conclusion.
That, and, many people unschooled in the scientific method think that "science" is encompassed by the body of theoretical work science generates, and that that, and not a philosophical framework of objective analysis, is the basis of the sciences. I think that's the reasoning- people do treat science like religion. In religion, saying that you now think maybe Adam and Eve were tempted by a mongoose, and not a snake, is an admission of falsehood in your teachings. In science, saying that you now think Einstein may not have been entirely correct in all testable instances, is not like finding out you were *wrong the whole time*. To some religious people- it *is* like that.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
One fairly obvious way the test could be flawed...
quote:Some Guy Quoted in Science Originally Posted: ...the tricky part is accurately measuring the time between when the neutrinos are born by slamming a burst of protons into a solid target and when they actually reach the detector. That timing relies on the global positioning system, and the GPS measurements can have uncertainties of tens of nanoseconds. "I would be very interested in how they got a 10-nanosecond uncertainty, because from the systematics of GPS and the electronics, I think that's a very hard number to get."
So yeah, I'm inclined to agree with Rivka (and everyone else who agreed with Rivka) here. In this context submitting the results for peer review is a lot more like saying "Hey guys, this seems impossible but we can't figure out where we went wrong. Take a crack at it!" than it is saying "Holy Pancakes! Neutrinos go faster than light!"
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posted
I've reached the point where I automatically discount anything CERN reports until its validated by several other groups.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
The "laws of science are different in another part of the universe" bit pisses me off because of all the shit grin wearing special snowflake idiots who espouse it as "science can be proven wrong!".
"No, it just means that in that part of the universe, they have different rules, but they are STILL the rules. You can't magically go FTL by being there, they will have their own light speed limit."
I try to explain that for things like FTL to work, it still has to be consistent with previous science.
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quote:Originally posted by advice for robots: I remember cold fusion. Was that really 1989?!
I don't see how such a discovery, if really true, would harm science itself. It might upend a lot of theory previously thought to be solid as stone, but isn't that just part of the process?
It is. But for people primed in the sort of thinking that a fair number of churches encourage in their members, a discovery that you may be wrong about a conclusion science has made is in itself an admission of some flaw in the scientific process, because it originally led you to that earlier wrong conclusion.
That, and, many people unschooled in the scientific method think that "science" is encompassed by the body of theoretical work science generates, and that that, and not a philosophical framework of objective analysis, is the basis of the sciences. I think that's the reasoning- people do treat science like religion. In religion, saying that you now think maybe Adam and Eve were tempted by a mongoose, and not a snake, is an admission of falsehood in your teachings. In science, saying that you now think Einstein may not have been entirely correct in all testable instances, is not like finding out you were *wrong the whole time*. To some religious people- it *is* like that.
Thanks for that. Mine was more of a rhetorical question, but it's a good point you made: the scientific process isn't broken when a long-held theory is overturned. It is in fact proving that it works. Laboratories will hopefully not be burned. Satellites are not going to start falling out of the sky if indeed they confirm that these neutrinos were doing the FTL thing. We're the ones who have to adjust how we think about the universe; the universe, for its part, is already content with how it functions.
I would add, however, that many people, religious or not, are capable of thinking wrongly as you described about the implications of such a discovery. Certainly some religious people can, and may have the platform to be vocal about it. But let's not forget the teeming masses of casual believers or unbelievers who are going to draw the same conclusion for one reason or the other. It's an easy mistake to make, and from there can be applied to a whole variety of agendas.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
Hasn't that been clear for months (even for those who weren't completely skeptical of the initial results)?
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I've reached the point where I automatically discount anything CERN reports until its validated by several other groups.
posted
Yeah, I don't know, I haven't been paying much attention. The original claim was absurd enough that it didn't seem to warrant much notice.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: The original claim was absurd enough that it didn't seem to warrant much notice.
Except by the media.
Also, I have not successfully added "holy pancakes!" to my vocabulary. I will have to get on that immediately.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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