Was Einstein Wrong?

But, but, but...there's a consensus among physicists that Einstein was right. These people are relativity deniers.
 
steingar said:
CERN Physicists find neutrinos that can travel faster than c, according to CNN.
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I thought we weren't supposed to challenge the laws of physics, last time I tried I was severely chastised....

Good thing someone is.
 
steingar said:
CERN Physicists find neutrinos that can travel faster than c, according to CNN.
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nah, the particles are actually arriving from a parallel reality that is slight ahead of our reality. Somewhere there is a reality with physicists wondering what happened to the particles.
 
Bob Noel said:
nah, the particles are actually arriving from a parallel reality that is slight ahead of our reality. Somewhere there is a reality with physicists wondering what happened to the particles.
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or why they slowed down when our particles showed up slightly behind:D
 
SkyHog said:
I thought we weren't supposed to challenge the laws of physics, last time I tried I was severely chastised....

Good thing someone is.
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Relativity is just a theory. Challenge away.
 
COFlyBoy said:
Relativity is just a theory. Challenge away.
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So's gravity (a theory, that is).. :)

http://xkcd.com/955/ has some interesting commentary....

<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/neutrinos.png" title="I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake)."
 
Doggtyred said:
So's gravity (a theory, that is).. :)

http://xkcd.com/955/ has some interesting commentary....

<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/neutrinos.png" title="I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake)."
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neutrinos.png
 
The problem may lie in the way time is measured in this experiment. There may be error, many physicists suspect that there is an error in the experiment, way too soon to declare Einstein was wrong. We shall see how it develops over the next months...
 
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olasek said:
The problem may lie in the way time is measured in this experiment. There may be error, many physicists suspect that there is an error in the experiment, way too soon to declare Einstein was wrong. We shall see how it develops over the next months...
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I don't know if it applies to this experiment at all, but I have been hearing more about the speed of light may be a variable and not an absolute. There is a burgeoning theory about this to help explain some observed phenomenon. But it is by no means proved yet.
 
ScottM said:
I don't know if it applies to this experiment at all, but I have been hearing more about the speed of light may be a variable and not an absolute. There is a burgeoning theory about this to help explain some observed phenomenon. But it is by no means proved yet.
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Awww crap. If the speed of light isn't a constant, then Nick might be right about the Laws of Conservation.
 
COFlyBoy said:
Awww crap. If the speed of light isn't a constant, then Nick might be right about the Laws of Conservation.
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It is one thing to say that the laws of Physics are wrong because you have data that says so. It is quite another to say they're wrong because they're inconvenient.
 
There's the possibility that what they measured is that time is not a constant, too.

Which is why this week is taking so darn long. Happy Friday everyone!
 
COFlyBoy said:
Awww crap. If the speed of light isn't a constant, then Nick might be right about the Laws of Conservation.
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Well for one thing we already know that the speed of light is not a constant. It is slower in certain materials. That is what is behind the whole idea of refraction. But what some scientists are theorizing is that at different points of time or places in the universe the speed of light may have been faster than what it is now. This is a theory that is not without controversy, but it does make some of the observed phenomenon explainable. But even the authors of it are cautious and stating that it is just an idea. That is what theoretical physics is all about.

This is of course very different than what Nick stated. Observation invalidates his hypothesis almost immediately. But if he has more than what he offered on PoA he should publish it and let the world see it.

Here is the orbital view of the theory I mentioned

John W. Moffat (born 1932) is a Professor Emeritus in physics at the University of Toronto.[1] He is also an adjunct Professor in physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.


Moffat is best known for his work on gravity and cosmology, culminating in his nonsymmetric gravitational theory and scalar–tensor–vector gravity (now called MOG), and summarized in his 2008 book for general readers, Reinventing Gravity. His theory explains galactic rotation curves without invoking dark matter. He proposes a variable speed of light approach to cosmological problems, which posits that G/c is constant through time, but G and c separately have not been. Moreover, the speed of light c may have been much higher during early moments of the Big Bang. His recent work on inhomogeneous cosmological models purports to explain certain anomalous effects in the CMB data, and to account for the recently discovered acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
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And if Einstein was wrong, so what? It won't affect my life in the slightest either way.
 
pilot_dude said:
And if Einstein was wrong, so what? It won't affect my life in the slightest either way.
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Yuhuh! Your GPS will stop working because they assume that general and special relativity are true. (As I noted above they are in fact theories)

It'll be worse than LightSquared.

Oooor, caused by LightSquared. I smell a conspiracy.
 
ScottM said:
Well for one thing we already know that the speed of light is not a constant. It is slower in certain materials. That is what is behind the whole idea of refraction.
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Alright, I was a bit imprecise in my jab at Nick. To state it better would be "If the upper limit to the speed of light is not constant..."

The theory of G and c being linked is pretty nifty. I'm going to ponder it a bit on the drive home.
 
COFlyBoy said:
Yuhuh! Your GPS will stop working because they assume that general and special relativity are true. (As I noted above they are in fact theories)

It'll be worse than LightSquared.

Oooor, caused by LightSquared. I smell a conspiracy.
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But Einstein's theory of relativity has been experimentally observed. That is why it is actually useful. In this case the reason it is listed as a theory is not that it hasn't been proven. It is that there are still open issues surrounding it. I am not saying you are guilty of this, but layman often confuse the term theory with something not being proven. In science that is not what that means at all. In science a theory is support by a lot of evidence that it is indeed a factual explanation of nature.

The single data point of this neutrino event, if it is verified and repeatable will not invalidate Einstein, but further refine it. Just as Einstein further refined Newton's theories.
 
ScottM said:
But Einstein's theory of relativity has been experimentally observed. That is why it is actually useful.
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See, what I said was funny 'cuz GPS is one of the best sources of experimental proof and actual real-world application of both forms of relativity.

I'm all about using theories for making life easier.

I routinely use the Pythagorean Theorem despite the lingering lack of 100% proof of its validity.
 
COFlyBoy said:
See, what I said was funny 'cuz GPS is one of the best sources of experimental proof and actual real-world application of both forms of relativity.
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In fact, I read about an experiment where they are using a satellite to look at the GPS signals that miss the lim of the Earth. They can measure the bending effect of the Earth's gravity on the navigation signal.
 
I guess this research could be true, but then it could be another manifestation of cold fusion.

There was some other research about 30 years ago that tried to demonstrate that certain particles could travel through certain media faster than light. I don't remember the particulars but I believe that was dis-proven eventually.

I suspect that what they were seeing actually proved one Einstein's theories. If an object with mass approaches the speed of light, time slows down. So if the particles attained a velocity near the speed of light, and then time slowed down, the particles would appear to be going faster than light, because light has no mass.
 
I think I remember hearing about that, they sent radio active particals out and measured the decay after a distance or something like that, time dilation made them arive less decayed than they would have for a trip of that distance at sub lightspeed.

Ioono going by what a HS physics teacher was rambling about nearly a decade ago
 
JOhnH said:
There was some other research about 30 years ago that tried to demonstrate that certain particles could travel through certain media faster than light. I don't remember the particulars but I believe that was dis-proven eventually.

I suspect that what they were seeing actually proved one Einstein's theories. If an object with mass approaches the speed of light, time slows down. So if the particles attained a velocity near the speed of light, and then time slowed down, the particles would appear to be going faster than light, because light has no mass.
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Particles can travel faster than light under certain circumstances.

Cherenkov radiation results when a charged particle, most commonly an electron, travels through a dielectric (electrically polarizable) medium with a speed greater than that at which light would otherwise propagate in the same medium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
 
Gary F said:
Particles can travel faster than light under certain circumstances.

Cherenkov radiation results when a charged particle, most commonly an electron, travels through a dielectric (electrically polarizable) medium with a speed greater than that at which light would otherwise propagate in the same medium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
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But the particles are still not travelling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

This example is deliberately confusing and should be stricken from the record/argument.
 
COFlyBoy said:
But the particles are still not travelling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

This example is deliberately confusing and should be stricken from the record/argument.
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When did that become a requirement to post in this thread? I was answering this previous post.
There was some other research about 30 years ago that tried to demonstrate that certain particles could travel through certain media faster than light. I don't remember the particulars but I believe that was dis-proven eventually.

I am familiar with the basic principles of general and special relativity from a course I had in Modern Physics as an engineering student in the late 1970s. I am sorry if anybody became confused but it is still an interesting principle. Some people assume that light is fastest in every medium.
 
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I bet they detect some type of error before too long.
 
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COFlyBoy said:
In fact, I read about an experiment where they are using a satellite to look at the GPS signals that miss the lim of the Earth. They can measure the bending effect of the Earth's gravity on the navigation signal.
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GPS is also used in the experiment we're talking about here. They use it for the timing.

Anyway, GPS isn't suddenly going to stop working even if this result does turn out to be correct. Just as technologies built using Newtonian calculations didn't suddenly stop working when Einstein published his work.
 
SkyHog said:
I thought we weren't supposed to challenge the laws of physics, .
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On the contrary, the only good science is that challenged.
Remember, the General (and Special) Relativity came from a challenge of Newton
 
Anybody have an idea how they synchronized two time references 730 km apart?
 
chucky said:
GPS is also used in the experiment we're talking about here. They use it for the timing.
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Has anybody checked whether LightSquared did any testing near CERN or Gran Sasso recently?
 
Gary F said:
When did that become a requirement to post in this thread? I was answering this previous post.
There was some other research about 30 years ago that tried to demonstrate that certain particles could travel through certain media faster than light. I don't remember the particulars but I believe that was dis-proven eventually.
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Gosh, I need a tongue-in-cheek smiley, so I don't get taken seriously.:goofy:

Cherenkov radiation is a case where a particle can travel faster than light through the medium, sorta. The description on Wiki says that the particle is traveling faster than the phase velocity of light through the medium.

I don't think most people would consider phase velocity to be the speed at which something is traveling, mostly because it would take a long time to explain phase velocity to most people and most people won't sit around for that kind of explanation. Most people are pretty smart in that respect.
 
COFlyBoy said:
Cherenkov radiation is a case where a particle can travel faster than light through the medium, sorta. The description on Wiki says that the particle is traveling faster than the phase velocity of light through the medium.

I don't think most people would consider phase velocity to be the speed at which something is traveling, mostly because it would take a long time to explain phase velocity to most people and most people won't sit around for that kind of explanation. Most people are pretty smart in that respect.
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Most people say, "Ooh, pretty blue light!" (When viewing same through water at nuclear facilities... Or in photos.)
 
JeffDG said:
But, but, but...there's a consensus among physicists that Einstein was right. These people are relativity deniers.
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Really?

Are there oil companies paying these people to propagandize against relativity?

Are these people claiming that the data that has supported relativity up till now is all fake?

Are these people claiming that the only reason scientists have supported relativity theory is that it gets them grant money?

You're usually more logical than this, Jeff. Don't let your politics determine your views on science.
 
SkyHog said:
I thought we weren't supposed to challenge the laws of physics, last time I tried I was severely chastised....

Good thing someone is.
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There's a right way and a wrong way to challenge the laws of physics. Doing experiments and collecting data is the right way. Denying existing data is the wrong way.
 
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