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

Thu Sep 22 21:46:22 EDT 2011

Ok, Folks,
If there is anything to this story, then everything
we ever knew about Physics will now go out the window.
You gotta love it!!!! Cutting edge!!!!!!
I love a good physics problem. Right up my alley.
I'm a BSEE so this will directly impact electricity
and electronics. 
I wonder how much effect this will impact meteorite
age determiniation and travel time from creation till
they landed here on good ol earth. If a particle can travel
faster than light, what happens to a group of particles?
And these are just the first two questions!!
Pete IMCA 1733

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [meteorite-list] ebay restriction on international auctions of
> meteorites? and faster than the speed of light neutrinos!
> From: "JoshuaTreeMuseum" <joshuatreemuseum at embarqmail.com>
> Date: Thu, September 22, 2011 7:29 pm
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> =======================
> 
> Phil Whitmer
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------
> 
> 
> Hi Yinan,
> 
> I didn't realize she came in that early in the game.
> 
> So who do we blame? LOL
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> MikeG
> 
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