“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.
Why? Because you can’t have neutrinos getting kicked out of taverns they have not yet entered.
From here:
The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the Euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana.
I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN (the European high-energy physics consortium) have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.
[….]
It means that the “standard model” of subatomic particles that stands at the centre of all modern physics is wrong.
Nor does it stop there. This will not just overthrow physics. Astronomy and cosmology measure time and distance in the universe on the assumption of light speed as the cosmic limit. Their foundations will shake as well.
Something to note about this is that, much as the new atheists would try to convince us that science is the only means of establishing the truth of something, in actual fact science never completely settles the truth of anything.
Science has never pretended to illuminate purpose, meaning or answer the question “why?” Worse than that, since new scientific theories on the mechanics of the universe frequently overturn all prior theories, the notion that it reveals the truth in any satisfactory way is also something of a pretention.
If science has never given a final answer to anything, there is no convincing reason to suppose it ever will. What it does do is produce a never ending stream of models that approximate the object of study to lesser or greater extents.
“never ending stream of models that approximate the object of study to lesser or greater extents.”
No. Science produces theories and models that approximate the object of study to an *ever greater* extent. If the new model is worse than the old, it’s obviously wrong and not worth bothering with. The classic example is Newton’s description of gravity getting replaced with Einstein’s, which is based on an entirely new notion of the space-time continuum. Yet Newton’s theory still works to a very good approximation under many conditions and is still taught in every school.
The Standard Model is not quite out yet. What the group at CERN announced was an invitation for others to confirm their findings independently. The reasonable assumption at this point is that there was something wrong with the neutrino experiment at CERN and that they got the speed of the particles slightly wrong (the speed they measure was very slightly greater than the speed of light). They can’t see a problem themselves and they’ve repeated the result dozens of times apparently, so they’re asking for others to confirm. The Standard Model has been experimentally validated to a very great degree many times over (just as Newton’s laws of motion had been before Einstein), and physicists are not about to throw it overboard because of one experiment with neutrinos.
If the faster-than-light speed turns out to be accurate – and there are good reasons to suspect that it won’t -, then the Standard Model does indeed need to be adjusted. The new theory will likely be difficult to develop, but whatever it will be, it will describe the physical universe more accurately than the Standard Model. The current approximation that is the Standard Model will still give the correct predictions about the behaviour or particles that it always did, to the same astounding accuracy, but the new theory (if there is to be such a thing) will be able to do even better.
Er … What does “Worse than” mean? “Worse” by reference to what? Has science ESTABLISHED something we can judge by?
Quantum Entanglement occurs in excess of light speed if the seperated pair partners are sufficiently spread apart.
Just about the time science becomes comfortable with itself these things happen. There is a point where these two theories conflict, so either one or both are wrong and more research is needed.
God has probably having a good guffaw over all of this.
“There is a point where these two theories conflict, so either one or both are wrong and more research is needed.”
This is always true of any number of current theories in science, and has been since Galileo. That didn’t stop heliocentrism or Darwinian evolution from being accepted and holding to this day, despite the best efforts of various churches. I don’t quite understand why the theists are getting so exercised about one series of measurements at CERN. Are they expecting all scientists to suddenly accept God and turn Christian because their theories are – gasp – incomplete? If that was going to happen, we would have seen it long ago. Some religious apologists will always use the argument of the ‘god of the gaps’, and the gaps will always be getting smaller. Incompatibilities between String Theory and the Standard Model, or the possibility of faster-than-light neutrinos don’t make the gaps argument any better today than it was in Darwin’s time.
For me the point is this.
Science is treated like a religion by many people today. They put far more blind faith into the prescriptions from their doctors than what most people put into prayer. The result is that science ends up competing against religion, and is used as a tool by the aithiests in their fight against religion. All too often we have heard aithiest proclaim that science has proven another thing about the Holy Bible to be “wrong”. But when “scientific evidence” is discovered that proves previous scientific theories to be wrong we here practically nothing about the shortcomings and failures of science.
Your point about Darwing is a perfect example. Today’s theory of evolution scarcely resmebles Darwin’s. Yet Darwin is still proclaimed as the final word about where we came from.
The truth is that science has about as much to do with religion as it has to do with history or literature.
I have also heard about the “God of gaps” idea. Frankly I find this idea to be foolish as it subscribes to the notion that science is a religion, or at least competes against religion to explain things. The idea is that as science discovers the cause and effect relationships there is little left for the Hand of God to do in this world. I however see the Hand of God at work, and His masterful design being revealed.
“Today’s theory of evolution scarcely resembles Darwin’s.”
This is not accurate. Darwin was right to an astounding degree, considering the limitations of methodology of his day. The major additions to the theory have been the concept of the gene, introduced by Mendel and others after Darwin, and the discovery of the nature of the genetic material, i.e. DNA. Modern molecular biology has followed from Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, and it has certainly shed light on great many things, but the central ideas of Darwin, namely heritable variation in a population and nonrandom survival still stand.
“Yet Darwin is still proclaimed as the final word about where we came from.”
No, absolutely not. Darwin’s theory has stood the test of time stunningly well, but the knowledge about the lineage of Homo sapiens is infinitely better today than it was at his time. Darwin had no fossils at all available to him. We not only have a remarkably good fossil record of the lineage of Homo, but the fully sequenced genomes of man, chimpanzee, orangutan, gorilla and about forty other vertebrates. We can trace the lineage of thousands of individual genes to our very close cousins and very, very distant ones in great detail. Darwin couldn’t possibly have dreamed of such a shocking amount of data in support of his theory.
“They put far more blind faith into the prescriptions from their doctors than what most people put into prayer.”
Yes, but that ‘faith’ is not blind, but rather placed in medicine for very good reasons. Just days ago a young couple in Oregon, USA, was convicted of manslaughter after they’d refused to get medical attention for their child and relied on prayer to heal him instead. Their baby wound up dead. There’s absolutely no reason to think that intercessionary prayer works, whereas approved drugs nowadays have been through large-scale clinical trials and have been proved significantly effective (which doesn’t mean that the doctors prescription is absolutely guaranteed to work for you, only that it works for many people with the same condition). The exception may be some homeopathic woo-stuffs that may have been approved in the UK, but are effectively just placebos.
“Frankly I find this idea to be foolish as it subscribes to the notion that science is a religion, or at least competes against religion to explain things.”
Well, why did the original blog post here raise the question of faster-than-light neutrinos and their implications for the Standard Model? Is this supposed to have some bearing on religion or not? I assume that the discovery is expected to somehow make people question the scientific world view, which it is absolutely not going to do. It wouldn’t be the first or the last stunning, paradigm-changing discovery in science. It may change a paradigm of physics, but not the scientific method. The (tentative) result itself was arrived at by the scientific method. But as I said, it’s early days and the speed of the neutrinos was, in all likelihood, a honest technical error.
Science isn’t about finding a why, it is about getting as close as possible to figuring out reality through hypotheses and theories.
Pleasant side effects include the technology that allows this blog to exist. Science is about discovering the nature of reality as best we can, it also helps the human race become more advanced (not that we always do the best thing with the advancements, see nuclear weapons)
I’d also like to reply to a quote posted above by David:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
This isn’t necessarily a logical problem, since the nature of consciousness is very much an unknown it muddies the water enough to make any logical proof for/against likely incorrect. However, the argument here seems to rest on the authors reasoning only being correct if he is conscious via some supernatural means, as opposed to the movement of atoms.
Consciousness of any form (illusory in a deterministic universe, random if quantum effects count or spiritual if supernatural effects exist) will feel the same to anyone experiencing them. Its the same as asking if you have free will. From an objective standpoint, its not possible to tell. Subjectively you feel as though you have free will, but feeling something does not make it true.
And now I should probably stop typing, at the risk of breaking your “comments longer than the blog post rule”
EDIT: I feel I should also mention, that in a wonderful demonstration of the peer review process, the faster than light neutrino experiment has been refuted as experimental error. This is what science is about, its not about finding the right answer the first time, its about hypothesizing an answer, then testing it and subjecting it to peer review to see.
The opinion of the majority of the scientific community about the neutrinos was “Wow, thats a cool result if its true, but its probably an error”.
It couldn’t be dismissed out of hand, thats why it took a while to refute, because its important to check things, instead of relying on faith.