Daily science stuff

[Silverbullet]

Had another Gas planet. Perhaps the solar system gave a big belch and got rid of the gas. Maybe a healthy Fart might have done it too.

SB

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Scientific breakthrough: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than light

[Cogito]

Relativity theory predicted that there was an absolute upper limit to speed, and the speed of light turned out to be remarkably close to the predicted figure, but there was no fundamental reason why the speed of light should be exactly equal to that limit. Until now, the possibility that the actual limit was fractionally higher than the speed of light was pure speculation, so it'll be interesting if that's been demonstrated now.

[Kotik]

Wow, 60 billionths of a second ahead of schedule. What do they do with all the time to spare

[justTripn]

Cogito, that's interesting. Please expand on what you said. You are the first person I know of not surprised by this.

[Silverbullet]

JT, I am not surprised by it either. Of course I don't understand a damned thing about Relativity. Ignorance is bliss I guess.

SB

[justTripn]

LOL (SB) . . . well, someone correct me here. I thought that there was no "predicted value" for the speed of light. That it was an empirical issue. However, by this time, that value would be pretty tightly constrained by our empirical evidence, and now this. Cogito???

[Transwarp]

I wouldn't get too excited. It's probably a measurement error or some other artefact of the experiment. If you look down the page, there is a link to another article by another scientists who explains that if there was an actual speed difference between photons and nuetrinos, we would have noticed it before. He gives the example of a particular supernova, where the neutrinos and light arrived at Earth at the same time. If the neutrinos were actually travelling faster than light (by the same margin as in the experiment) they would have arrived more than three years ahead of the light. But they didn't.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Dammit, don't burst my (warp) bubble!

[Cogito]

LOL (SB) . . . well, someone correct me here. I thought that there was no "predicted value" for the speed of light. That it was an empirical issue. However, by this time, that value would be pretty tightly constrained by our empirical evidence, and now this. Cogito???

[geek]
Maxwell pioneered the idea of thinking about magnetism and electricity in terms of fields and waves, and came up with the field equations that explained all of Faraday's experiments. By modelling electromagnetism as an interaction between electric and magnetic fields, he came up with interesting result. It turns out that the propagation speed of waves caused by two interacting fields can be calculated from the relative strength of the fields, and doing this sum for electromagnetic fields yielded a ridiculously big figure that turned out to be the speed of light. This was ages before anyone had measured the speed of light or thought about light in terms of waves or electromagnetism, although it's taken for granted these days. This was arguably the single most significant breakthrough in modern theoretical physics and is the foundation that relativity theory is based on.
[/geek]

[justTripn]

Thanks Cogito!

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

One-Third of Sun-Like Stars Have Earth-Like Planets In Habitable Zone

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

How Uranus got knocked on its side

[putaro]

Researchers have discovered how DNA controls the placement of limbs, etc.

http://actu.epfl.ch/news/from-whales-to ... hat-gives/

[Cogito]

Wow! How weird to find such a mechanical-seeming control process defining the basic body structure.