barleycorn Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 Wasn't Einstein against quantum physics because it already allows for things to travel faster than the speed of light? He was against it, but not for that reason. Einstein basically thought the universe was deterministic (ie if you knew the starting point of all the parts of a system you could predict exactly where they would be x amount of time later), Bohr thought differently in that you can only calculate the probability of various outcomes occurring. Einstein was wrong, Bohr was right. jb Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ampersand Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 Erm ... I think your experiment may prove a tad inaccurate as the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 233,900 miles. So other than needing to know the exact location of this mirror on the moon, have a laser powerful enough to reach it, a stopwatch accurate enough to measure the time it takes to come back, the ability to know when it has actually come back, and a torch to read the stopwatch as it will presumably be dark at the time, I also need to know the exact distance, which may vary depending on the time of day/year I think I'll just go to the pub Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mecky Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 Let's get this right, the speed was something like 60 nansoeconds over what they thought was the speed of light. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azazel666 Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 Didn't Einstein predict that if the speed of light were to be reached, then time would effectively move backwards? Assuming this premise (as there isn't an alternative yet), then technically this discovery hasn't happened yet! The eternal paradox!...:D:D:D As far as I am aware time slows down for objects travelling at ridiculous speeds........but never thought there was any possibility of time going BACKWARDS. But a couple of news reports have also suggested time travel backwards could be possible due to this find? Anyone know anything about this?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeffrey Shaw Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 As far as I am aware time slows down for objects travelling at ridiculous speeds........but never thought there was any possibility of time going BACKWARDS. But a couple of news reports have also suggested time travel backwards could be possible due to this find? Anyone know anything about this? Yes, I will. But that need not conCern anyone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Norbert Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 Let's get this right, the speed was something like 60 nansoeconds over what they thought was the speed of light. Nope, nanoseconds is a time not a speed. What we need to know is what was the expected time of the neutrinos going the 732km between labs - 0.0024sec And what the actual time of the neutrinos was - 0.00239994sec Doing the maths I think the neutrinos are exceeding the speed of light by a quarter of a percent, or - they travel at 300750km/s while light travels 300000km/s. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John X Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 I think I'll just go to the pub I thought you had asked how it could be measured, not how YOU could measure it. John X Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John X Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 Let's get this right, the speed was something like 60 nansoeconds over what they thought was the speed of light. You can't mix units like that. Maybe you should stick to slagging off Muslims on other threads. John X (BTW did you know that modern mathematics owes much of its existence to Islam?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HeadingNorth Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 So why was it concluded that nothing can travel faster than light? If a car is moving at 50mph, and you are in a car moving towards that car also at 50mph, and you measure its speed, you'll get a result of 100mph. If you are moving away from it at 50mph, you will measure its speed as zero, because it will never get any closer to you. In the course of trying to measure the speed of light, in a vacuum, ever more and more accurately, it occurred to a chap called Michelson that his measurements would be compromised because the Earth itself was moving through space. He designed an experiment to account for that - in effect, by measuring the speed of light while the Earth was moving towards a given source of light, and also while the Earth was moving away from it, at the other end of its orbit. Both measurements, and indeed all measurements, turned out to give exactly the same result for the speed of light, whether the Earth was moving towards, moving away, stationary or anywhere in between. In short, the speed of light always appears to be exactly the same no matter how its measure, and regardless of how fast the bodies involved are themselves moving. (To go back to the car analogy - if you measure the speed of light from a lamppost while driving towards it at 50mph, while driving away from it at 50mph, and while standing still - all three measurements will be identical, down to the tiniest fraction of a millimetre.) Einstein started thinking about what that implied; if the speed of light is a constant, regardless of the relative motions of the source and observer. (Hence, "Relativity.") He found that, if you assume that is true, then all sorts of weird things must necessarily be true as well. Among them; the speed of light must be an absolute limit, beyond which no physical object can ever go; that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down and the more massive you become; and so on. Every experiment that has ever been done to check whether or not he was right, has confirmed his predictions exactly, and not one shred of evidence has ever appeared to suggest that he could have been wrong. That's why it is no longer Einstein's Conjecture of Relativity, but has long since been accepted as true and promoted to the status of Theory. This neutrino speed measurement, if it is accurate, means that physical objects can move faster than the speed of light, which in turn means that the original Michelson experiment must have some other explanation for why you detect no difference in speed, regardless of your relative motion. However, the scientists who have just published these results, do not believe that they have proved Einstein and Michelson wrong; they believe that there must be some other explanation for why neutrinos appear to be moving faster than light. They're asking the scientific community to find it. If the entire scientific community gets the same results for the same experiment all over the world, and there are no errors or systematic flaws involved, we may be forced to conclude that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is not in fact true after all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phanerothyme Posted September 23, 2011 Author Share Posted September 23, 2011 So other than needing to know the exact location of this mirror on the moon, have a laser powerful enough to reach it, a stopwatch accurate enough to measure the time it takes to come back, the ability to know when it has actually come back, and a torch to read the stopwatch as it will presumably be dark at the time, I also need to know the exact distance, which may vary depending on the time of day/year I think I'll just go to the pub You could just use the (slightly flawed) chocolate bar in a microwave method instead. You'd be measuring the wavelength of microwaves and multiplying that by their frequency to determine the speed of microwaves in air. Which should be pretty close to that of light in vacuum. At least I think that works, seems a bit circular to me but it's what I read somewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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