question is: are we sticking with Einstein?

FLMAO!! I work in film industry and sometimes this is too true. Another is a bull's eye on wall with sign "bang head here".

 

Heh. I had a version of that on my wall for many years while designing software. Except, mine started with 'Is it broken?' and proceeded from there.

PDW

 

I am impressed with the quality of intellect here. Also humbled. Thank you for vindicating my judgement about some of the extraordinary participants.

For those who might be interested; See the book, Wrinkles In Time.... by George Smoot. Smoot is an astrophysicist, researcher at the Lawrence Berkely Laboratory, Has worked on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite that detected cosmic "seeds", who has been chasing neutrinos and bosons, and all sorts of other unimaginable things for many years. He even hustled the air force for the use of a U2 spy plane to explore some of his far out particle physics endeavors.

 

The post about COBE just opened up a lot of memories for me. Most of the spacecraft I worked on had similar acronyms. I worked on several NASA SMEX missions:

*FAST
*CLUSTER (CLUSTER #1 that was destroyed on the Airaine rocket - a CLUSTER #2 was built later)
*SOHO
*ACE

Our area of research was plasma involved in the Earth/Sun interaction at various points between the two. My work consisted mainly of writing software for the spacecrafts' onboard sensors we built. The software was used to calculate plasma intensity and direction, detect magnetic field strength, etc... I also ran tests on the various instruments aboard the spacecraft with a known plasma beam in vacuum chambers. This was to help us simulate conditions in space, so when the spacecraft was in service, it would function properly. We worked with ESA on a couple of them, so I spent some time at the Max Planck institute in Bern working on those.

Great memories of a different life gone by.

 

Me too. It may have little to do with boats, and I kinda wonder why it is in the "Boat Design" category, but this is a great thread . . .

 

Great minds like a think, and boats really make you think.

 

Spent a week on HMB ENDEAVOUR 1765 tall ship replica with ex-NASA scientist. One long night watch becalmed off Vancouver Island he told me about SNAP-27 they had developed, a self-contained thermo-electric plutonium power supply that the CIA had lost 2 of, trying to establish spy stations in the Himalayas (this was in the 70s) to monitor China. One blew off the mountain and disappeared, so they tried again on another mountain, and the same thing happened. He didn't say how they got them up there. Then when Apollo went belly up and the guys came back in the LEM, and had to jettison it to burn up over the Pacific, it had one strapped to the outside too that was supposed to stay on the Moon...
As a kid I spent every summer of the 1950s at Mt Wilson Observatory in CA with my grandparents who worked there, and thought it was perfectly normal at 11 years old to be recording projected sunspot activity on big paper sheets with a pencil at the solar telescope with some European scientist explaining celestial mechanics to me, then in the afternoon carefully watching the 100 inch telescope being readied for a night of discovery, and the next day watching the images come up under dim red lights while excited eggheads pointed out cool new things. That was in the days of film and a wonderful darkroom full of stinky chemicals.
I was lucky I guess.

 

I wonder in how many ways the experimental design included the assumption that things don't travel faster than light? I guess they can say oops, but not too much else. The quantitative stuff is out the window.

When an experimental result contravenes the assumptions made in the setup but preserves the logic of the approach it tends to result in a lot of heat and light. When a result contravenes the logic of the approach it tends to result in a more corrosive sort of revealing. If this stands up, it ought to pan out very differently from Einstein's augmentation of our perception. Until they get a handle on this, physicists are in limbo. Limbo isn't well funded and they are still using dialup modems there.

I predict that the initial set of explanations will follow the logic of the first case above. If you don't see the heat and light, prepare for the second round, one mostly of drudgery.

 

When Robert louise Stevenson built the first steam train the Rocket, some one (I forget who) said the human body would explode if it travelled faster than a horse. Most people generally accept this not to be true.

The world was flat not too many years ago. I think you might have to accept that many alterations with the science books may be iminent.

It will mean that we can go faster than light some place and overtake it and look back down it. We will then be able to see that Jesus and Ala or big Zuzu that live up the mountain and ALL the thousands of others can be seen a utter bull and we can finally stop killing each other over who has the right god and get on with life.

Religious abandonment would be a great gift to the world and the begining of intelligent life here on Earth.

 

The recent surge in religious ignorance and the mass de-funding of our school systems will slow our understanding of things we really need to know to survive the next round of species challenges.

 

well said Batty

One thing people who play with light speed scenarios often forget is that its long ago been proven by a guy named Kurt Godel that faster than light speed travel is possible. He wrote a little ditty entitled Causality that pretty much remains undisputed to this day. I guess it pays to be old Albert's best friend when it comes to dreaming up ways to prove relativity flawed.

Causality basically states that if a light bulb is traveling in a large orbital pattern at some fraction of the speed of light ( significant fraction ) and the light it emits also becomes orbital returning to its place of origin over some vast distance then the time at which it crosses the path of the light bulb that emitted it is irrelevant, IE that light can return to its place of origin, before, at the same instant, or long after, it was originally emitted. Its "speed" is infinite, in both respects of the word, infinitely large, or small. neither really define the instantaneous nature of the system.

His paper on causality to the best of my knowledge has never been successfully refuted.

 

One of the things I like about discoveries in pure science is that they are always subject to challenge, forever. This is whether the discoverer puts it out there or not. He is always wrong until proven right, and then, still subject to eternal challenge. My suspicions arise when there is any hint of secrecy such as the veil of proprietary claims. Cold fusion was able to hold a purchase temporarily despite the relative anonomanity of the scientists, because it was an "out of the box" thinking approach to fusion issues. Poor descriptions and measurement methods which took time to set up for replication, let hope build to a mania.

Some in classical academia do pursue "out of the box" solutions successfully, like Paul Chu in superconductivity. But the more consistent payoffs like graphene and many other things, have come from pushing out the walls of a known box.

This discovery will be interesting regardless of how things turn out.

Porta

 

When I hit the brakes, I am travelling faster than the speed of red light.

 

This text appeared on an electronic info-board over an italian highway, the day when CERN experimental data was released:



It says: "Neutrinos overtaking at Gran Sasso"

It proves imho that there's a genius sitting in every person, just waiting to show up when the moment is right.

 

Help!Looking for a program

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