relativity
Category archives for relativity
The New OPERA faster-than-light Neutrino Test: Results!
Posted by Ethan on November 18, 2011 Q: “Why don’t physicists shield themselves from neutrinos?” A: “Because they never see them coming.” #neutrinojokes Over the past two months, we’ve talked more about neutrinos than ever before thanks to an extraordinary claim that neutrinos have been observed to move faster-than-light! And as you well know, no particle is allowed to travel through spacetime…
Weekend Diversion: My other car is a neutrino
Posted by Ethan on November 5, 2011 “Events often move faster than our ability to comprehend them.” -Lee H. Hamilton But sometimes, going ever faster is where all the fun is at. Have a listen to the Stray Cats, from their debut album, as they plow through their title track, Built For Speed.Well, believe it or not, I think my car just…
A Test for Neutrinos: Put Up or Shut Up
Posted by Ethan on October 26, 2011 “Where there is no patrol car, there is no speed limit.” -Peter Beckmann You’ve of course heard the news that the OPERA collaboration in Italy has measured what appears to be neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. The way they did it was pretty straightforward. Shoot a pulse of protons moving at ultra-high…
Game Over for Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos?
Posted by Ethan on October 18, 2011 “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.” -Albert Einstein One of the most…
Galaxies near the speed of light!
Posted by Ethan on October 14, 2011 “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” -Albert Einstein Now that you know how many galaxies are in our expanding Universe, you might be wondering about their speeds. After all, since the Universe is expanding, that means that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it’s…
A New Test of Dark Matter vs. Modified Gravity: Who Wins?
Posted by Ethan on October 11, 2011 “The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.” -Alan Saporta One of the greatest puzzles in the Universe today is just why the Universe is structured the way it is. For the individual galaxies that we see, the puzzle is why they rotate at the speeds they do. If the only…
Are we fooling ourselves with faster-than-light neutrinos?
Posted by Ethan on September 26, 2011 “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.” -Richard Feynman Last week, a…
This Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Evidence!
Posted by Ethan on September 22, 2011 “Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules.” -Douglas Adams My inbox is on fire today with messages about this story about neutrinos breaking the speed of light: What’s going on here? A group (a large group, mind you) of physicists known as the OPERA collaboration…
Striving for the Speed of Light
Posted by Ethan on June 1, 2011 “The very closest stars would require many years to visit, even traveling at the speed of light, which is impossible according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Today’s fastest spaceships would require 200,000 years to travel to Alpha Centauri, our closest bright star. The energy required to send a hundred colonists to another star, as Frank…
The Fun of Going Faster-Than-Light
Posted by Ethan on May 18, 2011 “There is also an amplitude for light to go faster (or slower) than the conventional speed of light. You found out… that light doesn’t go only in straight lines; now, you find out that it doesn’t go only at the speed of light! It may surprise you that there is an amplitude for a photon…
