Here.
Since everyone wants to hear about the faster-than-light neutrinos, here’s some additional information about why I don’t believe it. Jon Butterworth explains here the problem with timing the neutrinos at the CERN end. In a postscript, a senior member of OPERA points out that he and four other senior members of the collaboration kept their names off the paper. Their reasoning seems to have been that this is a very preliminary, likely wrong, result, being sold as more robust than it is. Tommaso Dorigo had a similar analysis to Butterworth’s up on his blog early on, but was induced to take it down because the release to the press and the associated hullabaloo had not yet taken place.
Hmmmm.
Whatever would we do without real skeptics (who generally don’t set much store by belonging to “Skeptical Societies”)
How is skepticism like this going to get us closer to a warp drive space ship? Hmm? Think about that why don’t you.
Jehu, as to:
Actually there are many people who have thought, and experimented, long and hard about physical matter trying to approach the speed of light, and the results consistently point out that it is impossible for physical matter to attain the speed of light. In fact the current line of thought, from special relativity and all previous particle accelerator experiments, holds that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate even one atom to the speed of light. Thus the skepticism on neutrinos is soberly born out of decades experimentation and thought, rather than from any desires to crush teenage Star-Trek pipe dreams.
Some of us are primarily interested in the fact that the apparent faster-than-light neutrinos are not just explained away inadequately, and we wish more science were like that. Heck, those guys probably still even have jobs.
ba77 (paraphrasing): “Oh, it’s too hard to figure out how to go faster than the speed of light!”
Well, while you continue to make these arguments from incredulity concerning matter traveling faster than the speed of light, science will keep marching towards figuring out how to make warp drive possible. This “things simply cannot go faster than light” argument is a science stopper, and I wish you guys would can it.
You don’t need to travel faster than the speed of light to enable space travel.
Surely scientists are looking at how we can bend space time as much as looking at how we can go faster than the speed of light. I would have thought that this line of thought far more likely, since we know is at least possible to bend space time whereas we believe it is theoretically impossible to go faster than the speed of light.
Is stubbornly following a dead end good science?
Andrew, well said!!!
M. Holcumbrink, though I look soberly at the speed of light barrier and am rightly skeptical of the claims that it has been violated, I should point out that my skeptical complete block to ‘space travel’, or even to UFO’s, was severely checked by this passage of scripture:
Spooky huh?
Stubbornly following a dead end? Need I remind you that there are countless peer reviewed journals that are highly speculative that detail how we might be able to achieve warp drive capability. Besides that, the vast majority of scientists accept warp drive without scruple. Are you saying that all the time that has been spent towards solving this problem is all for not? Granted, we don’t have all the details worked out, but just giving up and saying it’s not possible and looking along other venues does nothing to advance science.
Disbelieving in warp drive is like disbelieving in gravity, for Pete’s sake. Your “bending spacetime” fanaticism is not science. It’s just not.
M. Holcumbrink, technology does not advance by ignoring recognized constraints, but by appropriately taking those constraints into account, and finding ingenuous methods to either overcome those constraints or to use those constraints to our advantage for our design objective. If, despite all the previous science and experimentation, the speed of light is shown, straight up, to be violated by neutrinos, then so be it, and we will have learned something valuable. But it simply is not prudent to take this one experiment, which hasn’t even been corroborated by another lab yet, and wasn’t even signed off on by 5 senior members of the team who did the experiments, at face value.
Well, you just keep on believing whatever it is you are going to believe, but in the meantime, we will have to make laws to prevent your anti-warp drive ideas from being taught in the public schools, preventing this dangerous idea from being spread at the point of a gun.
I suppose next you’ll start telling us that blind, naturalistic forces are not sufficient to generate the highly sophisticated molecular machinery, Boolean logic, machine code, cybernetic programming, or the exquisite display of engineering design principles we find in the cell.
M. Holcumbrink LOL, you state:
🙂
And what ever gave you that idea??? But by chance, in case someone does come along and decide to question the almighty power of neo-Darwinian evolution, do have any such example of highly sophisticated molecular machinery, Boolean logic, machine code, cybernetic programming, or the exquisite display of engineering design principles we find in the cell that you can point to that arose by blind, naturalistic forces??? Perhaps just one sophisticated molecular machine that arose by such a blind natural method???
notes:
Astonishingly, actual motors, which far surpass man-made motors in ‘engineering parameters’, are now being found inside ‘simple cells’.
And in spite of the fact of finding molecular motors permeating the simplest of bacterial life, there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of even one such motor or system.
The following expert doesn’t even hide his very unscientific preconceived philosophical bias against intelligent design,,,
Yet at the same time the same expert readily admits that neo-Darwinism has ZERO evidence for the chance and necessity of material processes producing any cellular system whatsoever,,,
What I find very persuasive, to the suggestion that the universe was designed with life in mind, is that physicists find many processes in a cell operate at the ‘near optimal’ capacities allowed in any physical system:
First, you try to crush my boyhood dream of traveling at warp speed, then you try to dash all hopes of me keeping God out of my thoughts. What is a materialistic Star Trek fan to do?
…On a serious note, all I can say is that I’m glad I don’t actually have to debate you on this stuff, ba77.
The “primary cilium” article got my attention, and at the end of it there’s this jewel:
I wonder how long the ToE lead investigators down the wrong path on this one? Finally, someone probably thought to themselves “hummm… I wonder if these primary cilia actually do something really really really important…”
I love this blog.