Saturday, September 24, 2011

idiots, being idiotic. In print.

So you've probably seen the news about CERN finding neutrinos that appeared to be moving faster than the speed of light, right? Time travel, Einstein is a big old dead wrong poopyhead?

Yeah, I've seen that shit too.

http://news.yahoo.com/faster-light-discovery-raises-prospect-time-travel-204403395.html

The members of the media who actually finished high school are waxing poetic about E=MC^2.

No one has actually read the paper, of course, in which the authors suspect a math or data contamination error, but can't find it. Yet. Being a diligent bunch, they're looking for folks to repeat the experiment and see what the hell is happening.

In the meanwhile, the media and poor saps united across the western world are booking flights to their nearest time machine.

Now, I'm not a physicist, but I had to suffer through Physics classes in college. And the psychotic, indecipherable Eastern Europeans who taught it, too.
I'm going to try to be topical, yet explain why I think this is probably another climb up Mt. Molehill.

For an object with mass, the faster it travels, the more energy is required for it to accelerate. Think of your car, and why a 60hp Dodge Neon can do 100mph, but a 120hp Toyota can't go 200mph. You need in the vicinity of 400-500 hp to get there. An 5-fold increase in power to double the speed. As you approach the speed of light, the force necessary to accelerate increases to numbers ever approaching infinity. So that's out.

I'm excluding relativity here, but I can't for long. Massless objects like Neutrinos and photons have it easier, in theory, except for the gamma value that doesn't get addressed in the simplified E=MC^2 equation. As objects move faster, they appear to move more slowly through time. This is relativity, and this is the gamma value. At speeds approaching the speed of light, time changes start to become measurable and noticeable. Gamma starts to approach a value of 1. This is why the speed of light is the speed of light. This is the speed at which the particles no longer experience time.

So the obvious question is how can something that isn't experiencing time be moving through time? If gamma can't exceed 1, but particles are moving faster than that, what is more likely, Einstein is wrong, or there's a bug in the experiment?

Never, ever go up against Einstein.

3 comments:

doubletrouble said...

Yeah, I think I'll just go have another beer...

Paul, Dammit! said...

That hurts, DT. I can't have beer. Stupid Exxon Valdez. I mean, the 3rd mate ran her aground. The captain was sleeping. And now I have to kill hookers when I want to quiet the voices in my head.

Anonymous said...

maybe time, like space, is multi-dimensional.