The Supraluminal Proclivity of Neutrinos; Who cares?

Food On My Dog

Before you skip along to another blog, such as "Food on my Dog" above (which went viral --10 million hits -- despite the fact that it has absolutely nothing other than still photos and videos of just a single, stationary dog with various kinds of vegetables, burgers, ham, cheese or pizza on it's head) I think you should at least get to know what this mouthful of a title means.

{Think it as your service to humanity something that Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Carpenter or the Dalai Lama would do. Knowledge never hurts, trudge on -- you could very well be the only remaining, sentient human specimen -- the rest having been eaten by the schizophrenic dog in "Food on My Dog".}

The 27 Km long particle accelerator at CERN; the red circle marks it's Path

The title refers to a recent observation at the CERN lab facility in Switzerland that has physicists all kinky and excited. It just means ' there is a chance that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light'. If you are still in the dark, well neutrinos are almost massless particles found within atoms where they are snuggled with other stuff called electrons, neutrons and protons. Yes, neutrinos are not neutrons they are actually different-- one has mass the other 'almost' doesn't. If you don't know what atoms, nuclei, neutrons, electrons or protons are -- then there is no need to knock the bejesus out of yourself and in all sincerity I wish you godspeed on your way to finding "Food on My Dog".

The rest of you would be pondering, if the subatomic neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light why should we care anyway? If they travel, they travel -- so? Those more knowledgeable might even scoff-- for it isn't the first experiment that has made such claims, only to collapse later under scrutiny (muons, photons and electrons in the Nimtz-Eckle tunneling barrier experiment).

The Atom: the planet like marbles are the electrons and the centre is the nucleus, just in case

As some of you might have noticed the name dropping of fundamental particles has increased, am not trying to be a cheeky scallywag by inventing terms as I go along, there are dozens of these oddly named sub-atomic particles -- fortunately not all of them exist as stable constituents of 'normal' atoms. Otherwise all atoms would be overweight and they would suffer serious atomic obesity. More importantly that is as far as am willing to go with subatomic particles, all those 'on' endings might end up with me earning an 'on' word -- a moron.

But wouldn't you care that it would be completely rational, and theoretically possible that you could become 'older' (relatively speaking) and perhaps even the spouse of your long dead great great grandmother/father?

In essence, by proving that something can travel faster than light means the space-time invariances that Einstein's Special Theory on Relativity are predicated upon would be shattered. (Invariances in Special Relativity are those things that don't change or more simply are considered impossible in this Universe, like anything going faster than light -- therefore if one is proved to no longer be valid the impossible would be possible ) Everything would be upside down. It might not be discernible at the moment but there is palpable anxiety, panic and excitement all across the world because if conclusively proven it would be the equivalent of the sky falling in the world of physics.

Because there is already a bewildering variety of sources (most with 50% incomprehensible science jargon and 50% Greek math symbols) which can inform you more authoritatively than my musings on this subject -- and for the sake of clarity -- I will keep it simple.

Albert Einstein; the Theoretical Physicist who formulated Special Relativity

The speed of light has been taken for a century to be a Universal constant (the designated principal invariant) , there is nothing that exists in material reality that is supposed to travel faster than the speed of light. Unfortunately that has always been a  mere but well founded assumption of Einstein's, one that has been very useful and which has given rise to numerous accurate predictions.

It had become such a believable cliche, some kind of gospel truth, that it has been accepted much like the commonsensical fact that chickens don't give birth to adult lions. You could intercept a fleeing cattle rustler somewhere in Pokot and ask him to name a Universal constant and he would hurriedly tell you in his mother tongue that it was the speed of light. 
 
But to make matters even worse, it wasn't the only assumption (postulate) there is the other one of causality and effect which asserts that the consequence of something can't happen before a necessary, preceding action e.g. you can't die before you were born, hence precluding the situation above where you would be dating your dead ancestor (the impossible act of dating your remote ancestor is an example of the Causality Paradox -- it exists mathematically as a possibility in the equations that describe Special Relativity; equations which I only kept reading because they had answers). There are other assumptions which Einstein made such as conservation of energy etc.

Worm Hole; The concept of time travel as envisioned with reference to Space-Time. The worm holes are known to exist and they are hypothesized to be short-cuts to the future or the past. They can also be shortcuts to  distant parts of the Universe.

What is alarming is that if one of the core postulates (assumptions) upon which Special Relativity is based is proved to be false, which is extremely troubling by itself, how then can we be sure about all the rest? In effect time travel, (amongst other horrible, human unfriendly things) as predicted by the mathematical transformations that are currently used to describe space-time, would be a very real possibility.

With Einstein's fancy theory going kaput, even though it is not actually all theory -- it's prediction of nuclear fission through Mass-Energy equivalence gave us the nuclear weapon -- there is a lot of headaches going around. If a few grams of mass can contain billions of joules of energy which can be released then time travel shouldn't seem so ludicrous. In the contrary, it is something that must now be accorded serious thought especially since we could soon be having the first incontrovertible evidence that points in that direction.

 That is how you might be ending up being your own ancestor -- by being involved biologically (read having sex accidentally with one of your great great great grandparents ) thus taking part in the conception of one of your ancestors! Don't ask me how such fantastic in-breeding could be logically rationalized on a family tree; far much more cleverer people than I -- real authentic geniuses ---  have no idea (but the creators of Ben 10 seem to have some pretty compelling views on time travel, another reason why kids should be encouraged to watch science fiction cartoons), in fact I wouldn't even want to have any ideas regarding this paradox. It is the surest path to lunacy.

Swampfire; one of the characters in the Sci-Fi cartoon Ben10

{ As a side note in demonstrating how much one can learn passively, in one particular episode of this Ben 10 I was surprised to see the concepts of inertial reference frames, relativity of simultaneity, time dilation and relativistic length contraction being explored, things I myself spent countless hours of my 'broke' free time in University to vaguely understand! -- your child or younger siblings could be wiser on Special Relativity than 99% of adults!}
 
Although am sure that there would be better use for time travel were it ever to occur, like strangling Hitler or chocking Stalin at birth, these are scenarios that are inching much closer to reality. All because the wretched neutrinos have so far been stubbornly proving that they still can travel faster than light. Scientists are not resting though, they are sparing no effort -- and money -- in tweaking their experiments just to prove themselves wrong.

Thousands of the best minds worldwide are being applied, exerted to the point of exploding with fatigue, just to empirically compel the damned neutrinos into respecting Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. But be that as it may with all the confoundingly complex implications, science wouldn't be science if others weren't trying as equally hard to resoundingly rubbish Einstein's neat theory -- and everything else hinged on it -- by proving that the neutrinos are indeed supraluminal.  

P/S: Am grateful for the inspiring interest this blog has received even though it is barely seven weeks old. With my newly found popularity I feel confident enough to be heading soon to Darfur; I will be urging my Janjaweed readers to stop the war nonsense . . .  otherwise I will hold future blog postings hostage. (Do all African terrorist militias have to have dramatic sounding names -- Boko Haram! Al Shaabab! Janjaweed! Mungiki! SunguSungu!  Inter-Hara-Amwe!; for readers who may not understand Kiswahili and Kikuyu the last Rwandan militia's name makes a jumbled command that states 'Inter (Milan?), diarrhea together!')

Fooling aside, actually I would really like to hear from you, so don't be shy click on the comments link below and give me your two cents worth.
MW.