[meteorite-list] ebay restriction on international auctions of meteorites? and faster than the speed of light neutrinos!

[JoshuaTreeMuseum]

Meg is taking over as head honcho of Hewlett-Packard.  I just was notified 
by eBay today that as of October 1st no more mention of emails will be 
allowed. They don't want any off eBay transactions taking place.

Also, this is pretty cool:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos?newsfeed=true

Faster than light particles found, claim scientists
Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat 
forbidden by Einstein's theory of special relativity

  a..
    a.. b.. c..  reddit this
  b.. Comments (80)
  a.. Ian Sample, science correspondent
  b.. guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 September 2011 18.32 EDT
  c.. Article history

Neutrinos, like the ones above, have been detected travelling faster than 
light, say particle physicists. Photograph: Dan Mccoy /Corbis
It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the 
universe and the concept of time - nothing can travel faster than the speed 
of light.

But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world's largest 
physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded 
particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein's 
theory of special relativity.

Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that 
raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, 
blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the 
fundamental principle of cause and effect.

They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern - the European 
particle physics laboratory - timed to coincide with the publication of a 
research paper describing the experiment.

Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking 
Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic 
particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the 
Earth to the Gran Sasso lab.

The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after 
running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 
neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran 
Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or 
minus 10 billionths of a second.

The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of 
light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 
299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 
299,798,454 metres per second.

The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with 
its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding 
until other laboratories confirmed the result.

Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the 
Guardian: "We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never 
a discovery until other people confirm it.

"When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that 
there are no nasty things going on you didn't think of. We spent months and 
months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors.

"If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial 
things we are clever enough to rule out."

The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the 
result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with 
their own experiments.

Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: "If this 
is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something 
nobody was expecting.

"The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding 
of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before 
effect.

"Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our 
construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are 
buggered."

The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 "bricks" of 
photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The detector 
weighs a total of 1300 tonnes.

Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato's 
team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the 
measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong.

Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being a 
fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or less than 
one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team's result is six standard 
deviations.

Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result was 
so radical. "Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be 
much more prudent," he said.

Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light processes 
at Indiana University, said that while physicists would await confirmation 
of the result, it was none the less exciting.

"It's such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without others 
replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this," he told the 
Guardian.

One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted that 
neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by interacting with an 
unknown field that lurks in the vacuum.

"With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the 
limiting speed in nature is the speed of light," he said. "It might actually 
be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly."

Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no electric 
charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was not there.

Kostelecky said that if the result was verified - a big if - it might pave 
the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a 
puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century.

"If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the 
structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to constructing 
such a unified theory," Kostelecky said.

Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another 
theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut 
through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra 
dimensions. "That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the 
speed of light when it hasn't," he said.

But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield 
University, said: "Neutrino experimental results are not historically all 
that reliable, so the words 'don't hold your breath' do spring to mind when 
you hear very counter-intuitive results like this."

Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago in the 
US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS experiment saw hints 
of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light in 2007 but has yet to 
confirm them.



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Phil Whitmer





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Hi Yinan,

I didn't realize she came in that early in the game.

So who do we blame? LOL

Best regards,

MikeG