If they had been able to find ANY flaw in their methodology or their results, you KNOW they would have made that a big part of their presentation. But they could not. And so they did not. And I’m sure they had the very best flaw-finders they could get going over their results and methodology VERY carefully before they announced. So, it’s not so far a cry as you seem to be saying it is. Right now, Highly Reliable Science Guys have announced a potential particle exceeding the speed of light. It would be foolish to say that physics has to be rewritten until the experiment has been thoroughly checked, replicated and verified. It’s also foolish to say the experiment means nothing.
Except, the guys at CERN said something did.
Sure, it definitely means something. But maybe what it means is that there’s a bug in the GPS software. Or maybe it means that some of the instruments they’re using have a different response time than they thought. Or maybe it means that some environmental condition at one of the labs causes the clocks to run a little bit fast or slow. Or maybe it means one of the researchers is a colossal dick and is playing a cruel prank on the world. Or maybe it means any of a huge number of other things. Any of those things would be important to know, and some of them could have major implications for science.
Speaking as a science fiction fan, it would really suck if it turned out this result in fact holds up, all of science is revolutionized, and as a result, it is theoretically possible to build a Neutrino Drive[sup]TM[/sup] Starship…which can travel at a maximum of 1.0000248 times the speed of light.
Gee, thanks a lot, physics!
Well, given that the fastest thing we’ve made so far (Helios 2) reached a whopping 0.00023c, your Neutrino Drive doesn’t sound so bad. If the acceleration is good enough, it would be great for intra-system hops. We could have probes in other nearby systems within a few years.
Granted, something that would carry us in comfort from Earth to WeMadeIt in about a week would be much cooler, but I’ll take what I can get.
Maybe, must it would be nice if you physics guys would show some enthusiasm for something every now and then. You’re coming across as a bunch of Sheldon Coopers.
When the biologists started to crack the human genome, they went on about genetic engineering and curing diseases with RNA and stuff like that - and it was awesome. But when the physicists began operating CERN, all they seemed to be doing was checking some theories off a list. This tachyon discovery, true or false, was the first thing even remotely resembling a practical discovery coming from it - and all you guys have been doing since is telling us that it doesn’t count.
So if FTL isn’t what physics has to offer humanity, what is? Inspire us. Give us your visions of the future. Because as of now, you guys seem as inconsequential as a bunch of Talmudic scholars arguing over the position of a comma.
The problem with the OP is that it shows a strong emotional attachment to a desired result, and that isn’t how actual science works. Nature is not subject to our whims.
You aren’t a physicist, yet you think you are qualified to rank them? Einstein was actually wrong about a lot of things. I seriously doubt the current generation of physicists are any less smart than previous ones, but I suspect it’s just become much harder to win anything from the coalface. By definition, it’s much easier to make a breakthrough from a position of greater ignorance.
And there is a large gap between the speculation and what has actually been delivered in the real world. Speculation is a good thing, but it needs to be clearly labelled as such.
CERN is a pure research organisation. It’s not possible to say beforehand what practical benefits might ultimately result from it’s research, as no-one knows beforehand what those results will be. Do you want them to just make stuff up? The theorists who developed quantum physics didn’t anticipate the transistor, which has had a vast impact on society.
Do you have any interest in science itself? Do you read up on astronomy for example? What interests and amazes me isn’t so much a vision of the future, as getting a basic understanding of how the universe works.
Believe me, we are enthusiastic about this. It’s just that we show our enthusiasm differently than you’re apparently expecting.
In fact, we’re arguably much more enthused about it than the general public. Most folks are excited about the possibility that it’s a genuine violation of the cosmic speed limit, but if it turns out to be something else, they’ll lose interest. Physicists are also excited about the possibility that it’s an experimental error of some sort, because it’ll be instructive in how to construct better experiments.
Not necessarily. I sweated bullets to get through College Algebra, but I recognize the reference to Fernat’s Last Theorem.
This isn’t true, if by “time travel” you mean travel to one’s own past and issues with causality and all that. You simply need a “preferred” frame of reference, with no travel to the past in that frame. You can have instantaneous travel in that one frame without causality violations.
In some other frame moving relative to that frame, you’d be able to travel into the past in one direction, but going the other way, you’d be traveling forward in time, so that over-all, you’d never get to your own past.
Sure, but then you’re violating a different law of physics (or at least, something that we think is a law of physics) by positing the preferred frame of reference.
The CMB already provides a preferred frame for the universe.
Well, yes and no, but that’s a more complicated issue.