Monday, September 26, 2011

As it turns out, Physics might be complete bullshit.

As I'm sure most everyone, a story broke last week that may completely change what we know about modern-day Physics. At Cern, the world's largest physics lab, tests have been conducted that resulted in subatomic particles moving faster than the speed of light; something that scientists have always deemed impossible. In fact, in Einstein's theory of relativity, he defines the speed of light as a Universal "speed-limit," and much of modern physics is dependent on this fact.
The test was run over 15,000 times, and always showed the same results. In many scientific circles, this would be considered a bona-fide discovery.
Antonio Ereditato, who gave a presentation this past Friday, has published the science teams findings; not in order to show off this discovery, but in the hopes that some one may see an error in their work. If what they've discovered is actually true, then the entire ground work that physics is based off of would have to be re-written. If nothing else, Dr. Ereditato says that, "My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved."

For a more in depth look, check out the BBC's article here.

Hopefully, we'll hear more soon.

8 comments:

  1. What does this mean for time travel?

    -Isaac

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  3. That’s fascinating. I knew that Einstein had said that particles can’t move faster then the speed of light but I had not heard about this discovery. I am going to do more research.

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  4. My friend told me about this and it blew my mind. I can't wait to hear more about it!

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  5. Bill Bryson touched on this in "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Still more puzzling was an explanation offered by Tony Weinbeck (a former astronomy professor at UMB), that the speed of light can be exceeded, theoretically, but an object/particle cannot accelerate from slower than lightspeed, to equal, to more than.

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  6. Even as someone who enjoys physics this really frustrates me. The moment I think I get what's going on someone throws in some many worlds theory, or slows light down, or finds particles that more faster than it.

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