[klaatumail] Re: travel faster than light
- From: Wesle Dymoke <wesdym@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "klaatumail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <klaatumail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2011 08:20:23 -0700 (PDT)
I've been away for a couple days, so I missed this disco, but as if on cue,
this was also waiting in my inbox:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/10/04/science/AP-EU-SCI-Nobel-Physics.html?emc=na
Basically, you're stumbling over what will probably become a common fallacy, as
this material eventually reaches classrooms in the coming years. You're
imagining light travelling across a very small space (a nascent Universe),
without taking into consideration that the 'space' it must pass through is also
very highly compressed.
I'm not coming up with a good analogy to describe this, unfortunately, which is
too bad, because I'm usually good at those. But what's going on is that in the
nascent Universe, the space we know of was much smaller (compared to now), so
the light travelling through it didn't go as 'far' as 'fast' as it does now. I
mean, it did, but the space itself was so compressed that compared to now, it
would seem to take light a very long time to get anywhere (as it does now).
That's assuming that you could measure that space as being relativistically
smaller than it is now, but you couldn't, because your measuring instruments
would also be smaller.
Except that these references to 'larger' and 'smaller' are ultimately
misleading, because the only objective measure of relative size is the
space-time continuum itself. It's the same problem as explaining that we don't
really need to answer the question of what happened 'before' the Big Bang,
because time itself is part of that matrix, so there was no 'before' to
consider, as time itself would have been infinitely compressed. It's also
similar to trying to refute the (apparently common, I'm told) assertion that we
are at the 'centre' of the Universe, because no such point actually exists: In
an expanding Universe, there is no true 'centre' other than any arbitrary point
that you choose to use as a referent; it's like asking where the 'centre' is on
the surface of a balloon.
For most people, the confusion comes from trying to squeeze inherently
multidimensional concepts into our everyday three-by-one space-time experience.
And for scientists who do grasp it, it's very difficult to break it down for
ordinary people, without reaching for the explanations that are most familiar
to them. (Try to explain to a two year old how and why a 'year' works the way
it does without getting into astrophysics, or at least planetary ballistics.)
In cases like this, the only way to make any real sense of it, without going
back to school yourself, is to meet scientists halfway. People who regularly
read popular science (from good sources, such as Scientific American or Science
Digest, not from ignorant crap sources like Fox 'Science' 'News' [sic] [sic].)
Without that kind of prep work, it's very hard for most people to grasp what
modern physicists are talking about, and it's also unfair to expect them to be
able to explain it in terms we can
readily grasp.
In any case, the researchers at CERN don't really believe they've clocked a
neutrino going faster than the speed of light, despite what breathless media
reporting. They believe it's an error, and are only asking others to help them
understand how it happened, because they haven't figured that out. The problem
for them, as far as they're concerned right now, isn't the possibility that
some particle actually exceeded c, but what they need to do to prevent such
errors in the future. They're like the cop whose radar gun just showed a Subaru
going 250 kph, but he can't find anything wrong with the radar gun. If you were
that cop, your first guess as to what happened would be that there's something
wrong with your gun, not that a Subaru actually went that fast. He needs to
find out what the problem with the gun is, or else he can't be confident in any
other readings it provides.
(This was a real thing that happened many times, by the way, in the early era
of speed radar, and presented a very similar problem. Early on, cops and courts
believed that radar guns were flawless, and many innocent drivers got hooked up
on flawed reports from the guns. It was later discovered that other factors,
such as weather and the shape of the vehicle, could skew the report. In one
case, a desk telephone was clocked at 110 mph. Radar was eventually abandoned
in favour of more reliable methods, and if a speeding charge is brought to
court the police are usually expected to supply additional information about
device manufacture and calibration, officer training, and so forth, to back up
the charge. In this case, the folks at CERN aren't trusting the report, because
they know it probably has to be incorrect.)
>________________________________
>From: "Bradley, David" <David_Bradley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: "'klaatumail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <klaatumail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Sent: Monday, October 3, 2011 12:11 PM
>Subject: [klaatumail] travel faster than light
>
>Hi all,
>
>Hoping some analytical minds on the list may have an answer to a conundrum I
>have.
>
>Recent news stories about sub atomic particles being found to travel faster
>than the speed of light has prompted me to think of the question even though I
>don't believe it deals with sub atomic particles.
>
>Supposedly things all started with the big bang.
>
>If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, then light would have
>arrived where we currently are in space from the big bang at the same time or
>before the matter that makes up our world and ourselves could have possibly
>arrived here.
>
>That being said, if we're here, how can our large telescopes look so far away
>and see light traveling from back at the start of the universe? That light
>should have reached here before we did and shouldn't be out there to be seen
>in the distance.....
>
>It doesn't make sense that we can see light traveling to here from way back
>when, if that light would have reached here faster than we did to start
>with....
>
>Right?
>
>Dave
>
>
>
>
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