Faster than the speed of light?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Um... wow.

I don't pretend to know much about physics, let alone about neutrinos, but it's possible, if these findings are correct, that the Einsteinian universe will have to be thoroughly rethought:

The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905.

If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that "if" is enormous. 

It's times like this when I wish I understood this better, and perhaps had taken a more scientific (and not political scientific) academic / career path.

Quantum mechanics, immigration, and the elite

By Capt. Fogg

So who's really the softie on the subject of illegal immigration? As with all things in America, the answer will be found in the alternate reality you prefer and not necessarily the one in which "is" means "is." Being elitists (because some of them are rich), the party of the working man is usually accused of being "soft on immigration," although what that means is hard to tell, but I'm taking the words of the other side for it, because they and their corporate sponsors can't have all that money and be wrong.

Those corporate sponsors however are pouring large sums of money into Republican candidates who may be expected as quid pro quo to go along with their requests that immigration quotas be substantially increased or dropped entirely. Sponsors such as -- you guessed it -- Rupert Murdoch, who according to the propaganda from the party he gives millions to and those who believe it, isn't a Republican or an elitist. Then there are the barons from Marriott, Texas Instruments, Hilton, and Intel, and many, many, others who want to bring in more immigrants, too. Some might be persuaded by the fact that they're universally Republicans who donate to the GOP and to their think tanks and own propaganda outlets for Republican viewpoints that they are Republicans. Welcome to America. Here we do not address such things as facts -- we take polls, and the polls, even when they contradict each other, tell us Rupert Murdoch is not a Republican or an elitist.

To be sure, and to try to keep in touch with sanity as much as possible, I have to say that Republicans differ on the issue of quotas and there is resistance in those quarters to the idea of increasing them. Both skilled and unskilled workers in sufficient quantity will depress wages and more surely because the idea of a minimum wage is also under attack from the same parties that want to open the gates further. Owning all the money and wanting much more at the expense of the struggling classes hardly makes them elitists though, nor is it class warfare -- not if the polls say otherwise.

I guess that favoring the welfare of the corporations at the expense of workers isn't considered elitist any more, while advocating a decent minimum wage is, but that being true, the word becomes awfully hard to define unless those tiny curled up dimensions mathematicians like Calabi and Yao assure us probably exist, come into play here. Reality is a very complex thing. After all, if a particle can be both wave and solid, and if, as Dr. Feynman said, with a nod to Messrs. Bose, Einstein, and Heisenberg, that photon has been everywhere in the universe along it's path from the sun to you, perhaps one can be an elitist regardless of one's position as long as one other disagrees with him. Then, too, things are relative, as Einstein proved, Jewish elite liberal that he was. If you skipped school like Ms. O'Donnell, it's probably just as much a myth as evolution, and who is to say she's wrong? That would be elitist, which is much worse than being right.

Certainly being for "smaller government" means being in favor of more agencies and more employees and more interference with private matters and morals while covering it up with Orwellian equivalences. Wasn't a farleftliberal and potential antichrist president the only one actually to shrink government amidst overwhelming protest from the small government howler-monkeys? By the way, if they evolved into Obamahaters, are they still doing it? I don't know for sure, perhaps Eisenhower did too, that lefty, but as Reagan and Cheney, amongst others, said, debt doesn't matter, and perhaps, as has been demonstrated with photons, there is no unique history. Everyone's right, left, liberal, conservative, and yes, elitist, depending on your framework. The same goes for smart. Even the suggestion that the guy with doctorates makes a better doctor than someone not quite qualified to be a union plumber is elitist although the perception is that being elite themselves, the smartest guys in the room have the least credibility. (Are you getting all this, camera guy?) That makes everybody else the real smart people, doesn't it? People like Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin and the host of Tea Party "experts" on history, economics, paleontology, and nearly any other discipline that is supplied by matriculating through a night at a Holiday Inn Express. They must be the real smarties because the polls say so.

In the history that seems apparent from my viewpoint, the people with the most and most expensive lobbyists and creative propagandists want more green cards issued and want to pay the lowest wages possible. I should probably state that the other way around because that's the way the vector of causation points, from my elitist point of view. One might be expected to think that the guys (and most of them are guys) with the lion's share of the nation's wealth would be elitists and likely to view the "masses" as little more than customers to be milked and the labor they use as a commodity to be bought as cheaply as possible. One does know that they view having to pay more in taxes as a result of the privileges that allowed them the power to get so rich is Communism although Adam Smith advocated it and Marx did not. That doesn't make them elite though, since the less than scrupulously washed sign carriers out in the street who just had their taxes cut are demanding even lower levels for Mr. Marriott and Mr. Murdoch, so, again, we can't really assign an absolute value or definition to the term, leaving it to be used ad libidum and as it appears in the vernacular, it simply means anyone you're jealous of. Republicans tend to be a jealous lot. They struggled for everything they have, you know, while others had it handed to them: lazy shiftless others, and elitists.

Of course, this is a populist, mob-motivated culture, isn't it? Polls determine what is true and truth is opinion -- even if the opinions of that mob correlate more heavily to the opinions they're required to have to expedite their oppression and build the wealth of Marriotts and Murdochs, friends to the common man. So if the mob believes that the Democrats are "elitist" by dint of having just as much money and perhaps a less tenuous connection with education, so it is. It's a relativistic world. It's a quantum world. the history and nature of what we call reality will always have been what it needs to have been to maximize power and wealth. If the Republicans win the presidency again, it will always have been some other way. The uprising of the oppressed masses will be both Marxist and Free Market fundamentalism, the underdog the elitist, the czar and the peasant indistinguishable; hard and soft, yin and yang: it all blends together in some uncertain, cimmerian mist and quantum foam.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Little pop

By Carl

It ain't quite the Big Bang, but...

While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup—quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.

The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot—4 trillion degrees Celsius—that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today.

We note that nothing melted, no black holes were created and the air conditioning in the lab worked fine afterwards.

Interesting, things did not go according to prediction, thus proving that the universe is nowhere near the orderly, precisely designed place that so many people lackign imagination believe it to be.

Indeed, even at its most elemental level, the universe is chaotic and random.

Even more interesting developments, like a possible answer to why the universe even exists in the form it does, have been uncovered from this experiment (short answer: matter and anti-matter should theoretically exist in equal portions, but they obviously don't, since we're here).

This is Big Science, the kind of science we used to do regularly but have now ceded to the European and Asian scientific community.

Because, you know, tax cuts!

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

When worlds collide

By Carl

The attempt to either unravel the mystery of life, the universe and everything, or the final nail in humanity's coffin, is underway in Switzerland:

September 9, 2008 (Computerworld) With the world's biggest physics experiment ready to fire up tomorrow, scientists from around the world are hoping to find answers to a question that has haunted mankind for centuries: How was the universe created?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has been under construction for 20 years, will shoot its first beam of protons around a 17-mile, vacuum-sealed loop at a facility that sits astride the Franco-Swiss border. The test run of what is the largest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is a forebear to the coming time when scientists will accelerate two particle beams toward each other at 99.9% of the speed of light.

Smashing the beams together will create showers of new particles that should re-create conditions in the universe just moments after its conception.

First off, just let that soak in for a moment: attaining speeds of 99.9% of the speed of light. That's a pretty astounding achievement, considering the relativistic properties of high speeds: mass increases in direct proportion to the percentage of light speed an object attains. Theoretically, a particle should become infinitely massive at the speed of light. That means, based on simple physics, it needs an irresistible force to move it.

Just imagine, then, when the particles collide, the amount of energy they will shed. What scientists are hoping will happen is the release of what is commonly referred to as dark matter and dark energy, which we have not been able to observe as yet, but which fill in some serious holes (no pun intended) in our theoretical constructs of the universe.

Dark matter and dark energy would be enough to offset the continued expansion of the universe until distances become so great that, in effect, the universe dies of extreme cold. With dark matter and energy factored in, the universe's expansion reverses gravitationally and collapses back into a new singul-- OK, this is getting too technical even for me.

Suffice it to say that it would be possible for a new universe to rise out of the ashes of this one if it collapses, and it might be possible to send information to the new universe that would allow us to pick up where we left off, so to speak. With a inifinitely expanding universe, there would likely not be continuing life after a time.

Too, the experiment hopes to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, the so-called God Particle, which is an elementary particle predicted by...well, let's just say that it disappeared just after the Big Bang, and may be responsible for things like gravity and electromagnetism, to keep it simple.

Naturally, an experiment of this scale does not come without criticism and guess what? Some of it is insane!

As the time for tomorrow's experiment has neared, rumors have increasingly circulated around the Internet that the experiments might destroy the universe by accidentally creating a black hole that would suck everything and everyone into it.

CERN released a report late last week saying that safety fears about the LHC are "unfounded." CERN Director General Robert Aymar was quoted as saying that any suggestion that there's a risk is "pure fiction."

I asked Professor Lawrence Lerner of UC-Long Beach about what the size of a hypothetical black hole created in a hadron collider might be and how long it would take to eat the Earth.

Dr. Lerner ran some quick calculations and assumed a black hole equal to the mass of the colliding beams of protons, and deduced that it would take upwards of a billion years for a black hole of that mass to eat enough of the planet to have a noticeable effect.

A billion years.

Surprisingly, the people who are most vested in this experiment, apart from physicists, have been strangely silent: evangelicals and other religious types.

As a Christian and a fan of science, I am all for expanding our knowledge of science, and solving the mysteries before us. I believe that God charged us with this when he said to take dominion over the land and seas and animals around us, not to conquer and subdue (although Genesis uses terms similar) but to understand them, to appreciate them and to find His hand in them.

Ultimately, I believe that science and religion can reconcile themselves. Ultimately, there will come a point when the fundamental laws that govern the universe break down and the resulting chaos is indistinguishable from random chance, except it becomes clear that there is indeed no random chance involved, but some form of structure and organization.

It is there we will find God, finally. I suspect he'll be quite happy to see us.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Top Ten Cloves: Things about breaking the speed of light

By J. Thomas Duffy

News Item: 'We have broken speed of light'

10. Dick Cheney finally right about something... Predicted that "Speed of Light was in its' final throes"

9. Investigators looking into if light was abused at all, and if Michael Vick was involved

8. Rudy Guiliani angry; "You leave my Speed of Light alone, just like I'll leave your Speed of Light alone"

7. Colin Powell says you break it, you own it

6. Like his call for an Energy Initiative back in his 2006 SOTU address, Bush will ask Congress to enact the "No Speed of Light Left Behind" legislation

5. NASA likes it ... The consequences of an "astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving" would help cut down on their drinking

4. Bill O'Reilly upset, believes it's a breakdown in traditional values; Launches war to "Save Our Speed of Light"

3. Next goal is to break speed of which Bush Administration breaks laws

2. CIA did an immediate check of their Secret Prison logs, to see if they had anyone named "Speed" or "Light" being tortured

1. Scientists who broke the theory are looking forward to hearing "Hey Nimitz" or "Hey Stahlhofen" used, instead "Hey Einstein" as a derogatory remark when someone does something stupid
















(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

Faster than a speeding bullet

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Two German physicists, according to The Telegraph, "claim to have broken the speed of light -- an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time". (They didn't break the speed of light themselves, literally, but, if they're right, microwave photons did.)

Interesting, and potentially revolutionary.