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

Fri Sep 23 01:32:30 EDT 2011

Looks like the last haven is to have a clickable link to your site 
which does not have items for sale on it.  At least your email can be 
on there for the moment.  Alternately a phone number isn't explicitly 
prohibited.  Nor telling them to google your ebay user name or 
something unique that will find what a great guy you are (like a beer 
club membership number) if there is good reason you want someone to 
find you without having to conform to the new sheepdog herding policy...

-----Original Message-----
From: JoshuaTreeMuseum <joshuatreemuseum at embarqmail.com>
To: meteorite-list <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Thu, Sep 22, 2011 8:29 pm
Subject: [meteorite-list] ebay restriction on international auctions of 
meteorites? and faster than the speed of light neutrinos!

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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