Wow, if this is real....wow! Scientists sent muon neutrinos through the Earth from Switzerland, 732 kilometers down to a detector in Italy, but they arrived too soon. That is, they arrived 20billionths of a second faster than the speed of light....a theoretical impossibility and the cornerstone of modern physics. And they did this 16,000 more times as the stupefied scientists repeated the experiment.
What does it mean you ask? Who knows? Maybe time travel has become slightly more possible if the results hold. Perhaps light-speed space travel could propel man to distant planets whose civilizations we could destroy in order to rape their planet of natural resources and colonize their home. Or perhaps even the gravity field around Michael Moore might not bend space-time so much after all. Whatever, I'm interested in the final assessment of this discovery.
4 comments:
Time travel would be a can of worms, more powerful than a nuclear bomb. The concept of light speed travel seems awesome. Exploration and eventual colonization would more than justify the cost of R&D.
The first time-travel order of business: prevent the 1913 establisment of the U.S. Federal Reserve System.
Ed, I just love stuff like this. Clearly, the majority of physicists think this will turn out to be a measurement error, or some such. We find out stuff this way.
I will avoid for now the obvious reference to the "settled science" of AGW.
The three main possible sources of error (at least according to one expert) are 1) in the measurement of distance between the point the particle was created and where it was detected, 2) in the measurement of the time it took to travel from one point to the other or 3) in the structure of the accelerator upon which the whole measurement relies.
Future experiments are expected to deliver results accurate to one nanosecond!
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