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Evidence of a Correction To the Speed of Light
KentuckyFC writes: In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a second burst. These turned out to have been produced by the collapse of the core of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits our galaxy. And sure enough, some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant in that region, as it became a supernova, now known as SN1987a. But why the delay of 7.7 hours from the first burst of neutrinos to the arrival of the photons? Astrophysicists soon realized that since neutrinos rarely interact with ordinary matter, they can escape from the star's core immediately. By contrast, photons have to diffuse through the star, a process that would have delayed them by about 3 hours. That accounts for some of the delay but what of the rest? Now one physicist has the answer: the speed of light through space requires a correction.
As a photon travels through space, there is a finite chance that it will form an electron-positron pair. This pair exists for only a brief period of time and then goes on to recombine creating another photon which continues along the same path. This is a well-known process called vacuum polarization. The new idea is that the gravitational potential of the Milky Way must influence the electron-positron pair because they have mass. This changes the energy of the virtual electron-positron pair, which in turn produces a small change in the energy and speed of the photon. And since the analogous effect on neutrinos is negligible, light will travel more slowly than them through a gravitational potential. According to the new calculations which combine quantum electrodynamics with general relativity, the change in speed accounts more or less exactly for the mysterious time difference.
Since they've established the difference between the theoretically-idealized neutrino and the observed photon, do they correct the idealized, or do they correct the observed?
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There's an alternative explanation. Space-Time could have non-zero viscosity, and slow down photons.
There are a lot of reasons to consider that space might have a viscosity. For one thing, it would neatly explain the expansion of the universe, without the necessity of invoking dark matter and dark energy.
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FIRST POST
(however, the apparent local time when you see this post may differ based on the apparently non-constant nature of c )
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The electron-positron pair CAN'T travel at c, so there must be a deceleration when the pair is formed. Sure, when they recombine to become a photon again, they must (by definition) be traveling at c once more. So, by my thinking, either c varies with distance, or there's something wrong with this model. Could one of you astrophysics guys speak to this?
What is the evidence that the process which produces the neutrino flux is contemporaneous with the process which produces the light burst in a collapsing star?
...is "more or less exactly" ?
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Presumably this happens all the time for light so what we've measured as the speed of light is correct, it's just that the true universal speed limit is higher and only neutrinos travel that fast. So we should find out that speed and use the speed of neutrinos when doing relativistic corrections.
What is a finite chance?
For that matter, what is an infinite chance?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Distance to Magellanic Cloud (158K LY) divided by 7.7 hours. Light travels 300,000,000 meters a second. So that would be a delta of a couple feet per second. I'd think we'd see something large in our solar system.
Or it could be a badly written summary and article that completely misrepresent what is being stated.
If every science journalist on the planet were to spontaneously combust, not only would it introduce a whole new physical phenomenon, it would cause the average IQ of the planet to jump by at least 5 points.
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There seems to me to be a slight error in the original article. Neutrinos have been determined to possess mass. It is only a slight amount of mass, but it precludes them from being able to travel at exactly the speed of light. How close to light-speed do they normally travel? I can't say. But it is reasonable to think that the distance from Supernova 1987A to Earth should have led to a slightly later arrival time, for neutrinos, than if they had actually traveled at light-speed.
The preceding relates to another thing, the quantum-mechanical mechanism for interfering with the actual speed of light. Those pairs of virtual particles that form also have mass. That means, while they temporarily exist, they also cannot be traveling at exactly light-speed; they have to be traveling slightly slower.
So I guess there's no question that we know every detail of what happens as a star is collapsing and that the photons didn't just take longer than we think they should to make their way out? And, also, wasn't this optical photons they were looking for? What if there was a brightening, but below the threshold of the detectors? If it's radio/X-rays/etc. then see the first sentence.
The photons still move at 2.99x10^8m/s. It's the electrons and positrons that move slower.
This whole premise sounds wrong and needs data to confirm it. The problem is that the article is wrong to claim that neutrinos move at the speed of light - they have a non-zero mass and so must move slower than this. However their mass is incredibly small (probably ~100,000 times less than an electron - so small that we have not actually measured it yet!) so they move very close to the speed of light. What sounds dodgy is that they are claiming that the primary effect of the non-zero neutrino mass is negligible while the secondary effect of the zero-mass photon coupling to virtual electron-positron pairs is more significant. A quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that the neutrino mass could cause a ~30 minute delay in the neutrino arrival over such a distance.
In addition they are basing this on being able to accurately calculate the scattering delay time of photons in a super nova. Less than a decade ago super nova models could not even get the star to explode (the explosion was not powerful enough and was overcome by gravity) so I have a hard time believing that they have perfected things to the extent where can really give a reliable number for the scattering delay time.
As usual extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far there is much of the former and none of the latter. Although it is also possible that the article is completely misrepresenting the claims but if so it is doing an even worse job of it that you suggest!
Is it possible that they just misjudged the distance between the earth and the supernova by 4.7 lighthours?
Genuine question - this seems like an interesting thing, but as someone whose expertise in physics is incredibly limited, is there anyone who would be willing to provide an "explain it like I'm five" version for an individual like myself who is interested in understanding the speed differences observed in the particles?
Thanks, internet!
What part of the site needs a tablet?
Based on the last 100 crackpots that said the speed of light was wrong... or that it was variable...
and that I've never heard of this guy, and no other physicists are talking about this that I can tell...
I'm calling bullshit.
Maybe I'll feel dumb tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure physics blogs would be exploring right now if this were even remotely true.
also, this is just a blog post...
What could lead to the acceptance of an alternate cosmology is when one of them is more refined than Relativity. So far there's a lot of BS out there, but nothing coming close to Relativity.
I'll at least give you points for not putting up a link to that Plasma Cosmology bullshit.
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Photons travel slower than neutrinos because they dawdle.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Franson's idea, as I understand it, is that during the small window between creation and annihilation, the massive particles are under the influence of gravity, which bleeds off energy. When the pair recombines, it results in a reduced velocity of the photon.
Now, as I understand it, reducing the energy of a photon would merely reduce its frequency (red-shifting), not affect its actual velocity.
However, over long distances, the total time required for a photon to travel distance X would thus be slightly more than X/c, based on the proportion of time spent as a pair of massive particles, rather than as a massless photon. From a statistical perspective, this yields an average velocity of slightly less than /c/ (the speed of light in a vaccuum).
This seems reasonable to me, at least at first.
mrsquid0 raises an issue, though: Photons in the visible light range are not sufficiently energetic to create an electron-positron pair. I do not know if the photons in question were in the visible light range or not.
NoNonAlphaCharsHere also raises an important point: the electron-positron pair *cannot* travel at the speed of light. In fact, he/she raises an even better idea than Franson; my reading of Franson's explanation is that gravity is slowing down the particles (gravity field behind the photon), but there's just as much opportunity for gravity to *speed up* the particles (gravity field in front of the photon).
Now, I don't feel like doing all the math for this one little message, so here are the things I would consider before taking this article (and the original paper) at face value:
That is the stupidest thing I've read today.
The headlines seems needlessly sensationalist (I know, shocking!) since apparently we're saying that photons don't always travel at the speed of light, not that the speed of light needs to be "corrected".
sic transit gloria mundi
Okay, let's say you have two cars, a Porsche and an NSX (representing a photon and a neutrino, respectively). Both are limited by the same speed limit, which they always travel at (the speed of light).
Well, due to some weird quantum mechanics, every so often that Porsche splits into a pair of motorcycles, because apparently they got bought by Wayne Enterprises or something (in actuality, they split into an electron and anti-electron). They almost immediately join back together (forming a photon again), but while they're motorcycles, they are affected by wind (gravity). They still can't break the speed limit, but sometimes it slows them down just a bit.
When you're traveling almost literally between galaxies, that little bit of slowdown for tiny snippets of time can really make a difference. In this case, the NSX made it here a few hours earlier.
While it is quite speculative, but what if this effect makes father light sources to be more redshifted? Then observed accelerated expansion of the Universe might be explained by just interaction of photons with some matter while light travels, the more it travels, the more the shift and not because of relative speed of galactics
Or the average IQ would remain 100, since it's a fixed number.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I think you are confusing neutrinos, which have been known for a while, with tachyons, which are speculative and haven't been detected. Neutrinos don't move faster than light.
Neutrinos have virtual particle interactions as well. Only low energy photons seem not to (that I remember diagrams for, maybe they do too).
So ALL THINGS are made by the devil except for infrared light and AM radio. Seems to explain why looking at things makes you question stuff (visible light is a lie!) and only AM radio tells the truth.
you can find the speed of light with 1), a microwave, 2) a chocolate bar, and 3) a ruler
with much better precision than 25%
The summary (and linked article) do a poor job of explaining the process and imply some change in the speed of light (there isn't one). The problem with the article (http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6986) is that it ignores a bunch of more relevant data: Fermi-LAT observed photons from the same GRB over a very wide energy range placing an extremely good limit on effects like this proposed in the article (http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3463).
Furthermore this is NOT new; the original article was posted in 2011 and only recently published in the "New Journal of Physics" which has apparently only published 16 volumes and I believe has had its email permanently redirected to my spam box.
Finally why do people link to Medium and not the actual article for physic related news items? We have demanded open, free access to all our papers since the birth of the internet (I speak as a physicist). Do everyone a favor and find the arxiv link and include it in your summary when submitting physics stories to Slashdot.
Apparently, there's a 1 in 10,000 chance that it's all a coincidence... and if you consider the number of observations being made, and the implications (aka other observations we should see), that's a really high chance. For example, it would mean that the Large Electron–Positron Collider was accelerating particles to faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, without anyone having noticed.
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Could this go on to contribute to the explanation of the increase in expansion of the universe? if the distance between gravitational wells is increasing then the gravitational effect on the electron / positron pair would be reduced prior to them recombining in to a photon?
When 1987A happened, it is fair to say that an enormous amount of attention was placed on those neutrinos - >> 1 paper per neutrino. The report of an earlier neutrino burst from the Mt Blanc LSD was discussed at length - see Arnett 1987 Table 1 for the time line.
The facts are these - the optical supernova could not be accurately timed, it wasn't bright at Feb 23.10 and it was at 2 / 23.443. The Mt Blanc LSD burst was at 2 / 23.12, while the other two detectors had a mutual burst at 2 / 23.316. Note that both neutrino bursts occurred before the optical SN was detected, and also that none of the other detected picked up the Mt Blanc LSD burst.
All of this has been known a long time, and numerous theories have been introduced to explain it.
- formation of a nlack hole (from the neutron star)
- formation of a quark star (from the neutron star)
- the Mt Blanc data were unrelated to the SN (that appears to be Arnett's viewpoint).
So, this is another explanation, and not a super compelling one to me. It will clearly never be proven from the SN 1987A data - the next such close supernova should have a lot of neutrino data, and maybe will resolve the issue.
If you reverse the polarity of the neutrino beam, you might be able to detect the tachyon pulse that's out of phase with normal matter!
If you chose your units of measure correctly, c^2 = c^3 = c^n = 1, and under this choice. E=m.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Slow down there! That won't work unless you first realign the flux compensator in the neutrino emission arrays to match the carrier wavefront patterns of the tachyon capacitor coils.
Then it will be just like catching a butterfly with a net!
and oh by the way photons can momentarily turn into other shit on their journeys yet somehow neutrinos can't.
I don't study particle physics, but from what I understand, for photons or neutrinos to "turn into other shit", they need to interact with something -- such as the particles they create, atomic nuclei, etc. Photons interact through electromagnetic forces -- which is the strongest force out there. In contrast, neutrinos interact via the weak force. As you might guess, that force is very weak. That's why neutrinos are so hard to detect.
Since photons interact with "other shit" via a much stronger force than neutrinos, photons are much, much, much more likely to "turn into other shit" than neutrinos are.
So, sorry internet troll, this isn't "cherry picking"; it's science. Deal with it.
That is only true if the faster then light particle carries information. The way I heard it (and I don't remember where and whether it was much more then speculation) was that photons average the speed of light so they might go a bit faster, then a bit slower then c. There is also phenomena such as quantum entanglement that clearly show the speed of light being broken or bypassed with no information being transmitted faster then light. There are other quantum effects that also seem like they may be instant, unluckily it is really hard to measure speed at trillionths of an inch.
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they generally operate at 2.4GHz, which is the resonant frequency of water. Yes, a leaky microwave oven will interfere with wifi and bluetooth.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
...that the definition of the speed of light includes the term "in vacuo" for a reason?
It means, literally, "in vacuum". As in, the complete absence of matter along the path. Which is impossible even in laboratory conditions, never mind out in space where deep interstellar density runs on the order of tens of atoms per cubic metre. That might not sound like much but with the quantum probability of a photon polarising and forming a pair with mass, that pair will be subject to gravitational effects (even from a dust particle). The vector is changed for the pair and therefore the photon. There is an increasing probability that on its way through a region with stellar-plus-sized masses, the photon/pair will be subjected to immense gravitational effects resulting in a lensing effect to the observer. This does NOT mean that the speed of the photon is changed - it is still travelling in a pretty constantly rare soup - only that its path is changed. Its lens-pair photons will arrive at the same time to the observer *providing they do not encounter another lens on the way* - which given an infinite universe is a definite possibility, however unlikely/unobserved within our observation sphere. Should this happen, I predict a delay between one photon path intersecting the observer and another from the same source at the same instant having passed through a lens. Could this be predicted using a single light source and two sensors: one through a glass fibre path straight to the source and another through a glass fibre path of the same material characteristics but that takes a longer and more circuitous route?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
They operate at 2.4 GHz because that frequency was set aside for use in industrial and other non-communication uses, which is also how it ended up used for wifi, "We don't care if you dump communication on this band without a license, just remember you can't ask industrial sources from stopping what they are doing." It isn't a particular resonance of water, just a matter of convenience and engineering ease. Commercial and industrial microwave ovens tend to operate at 900 MHz, because it is easier to make more efficient, higher power sources at that frequency, while 2.4 GHz is harder but produces smaller units, and the next ISM band at 5.8 GHz is a bit too hard to be economical. The efficiency of heating clean water actually increases at higher frequencies up into the 10s of GHz, although water with dissolved salts and temperature dependence of dielectric properties of water smear that out a lot so it doesn't matter too much what frequency you use over more than an order of magnitude.
What lack of observational evidence? Neutrinos do not produce Cerenkov radiation (light booms, caused by traveling faster than light) in a vacuum, but they do in a fluid such as they do at neutrino detectors such as this one. This indicates that they travel faster than light when light is barely slowed down, but not when light is in a vacuum. Hence, the evidence indicates that neutrinos travel close to, but not at the speed of light. How close? We haven't measured that yet (to my knowledge) but we can: detect them in materials with refractive index progressively closer to 1.00 until the light booms stop. That's when the speeds match.
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Does the extreme distances of very far galaxies red shift and rapid expansion, better explained by vacuum polarization and a slow down of light over extreme distances? So that what we are not seeing is some sort of doppler shift, but instead of something akin to friction over very long distances using this process that both delays the light, and shifts the frequency to red? And if so, does this change the expansion of the universe answer?
No particle travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum. Light travels slower in certain materials to the point it is almost completely stopped (several experiments are studying such events). Cerenkov radiation occurs when a charged particle exceeds the speed of light in a certain material (e.g. water). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The necessity of mass is not an assumption and it has nothing to do with the passage of time. In short, oscillation can only occur if the neutrinos are produced in states that are a mixture of multiple physical states. Generically, the physical states are the ones that have well-defined values of mass. But, if all of the neutrinos have the same mass (whether it's 0 or not), then any mixture of the states is equally physical; so, the flavor states in which neutrinos are produced are, themselves, physical states, meaning that there's no mixing. So, it's not that they need to have mass, per se, it's that their masses need to differ from each other, meaning that at least two of the three states have to have non-zero mass.
Also, neutrinos can turn into other things in flight. For instance, an electron neutrino can briefly turn into an electron and a W^+ (well, in the same sense that a photon can "turn into" and electron and a positron, which isn't really quite a correct description, anyway). The thing is, because the mass of the W is so high, this sort of fluctuation is much rarer and lasts for a much shorter time. (This is where the statement about the weak force making these oscillations less relevant comes in.)
But, the problem with evidence for deviation from the speed of light is that, to not be an effect too small to measure, we would need to be looking at extremely low energy neutrinos. But, we don't actually have any ways to detect neutrinos with such small energies.
All that said, I actually have some issues with the idea presented. I haven't gone through the paper in detail; but, it seems like it's probably generating a violation of relativity by not actually working in a fully relativistic framework in the first place. It looks like the treatment of gravity may be too classical; but, that's just from a cursory look.
It's not actually the neutrinos that produce the Cerenkov radiation in detectors. That only happens when a neutrino interacts in a way that either produces a high energy charged particle or gives a great deal of energy to a charged particle that is already present. In either case the need for an interaction with matter that's present in the detector means that such interactions will be very rare in vacuo; and, given how special the condition we need to actually see these events in detectors, it's unlikely that we would detect them in vacuo even if they happened. Further, since the Cerenkov radiation has to do with the speed of the charged particle, its presence or lack thereof wouldn't actually tell us about the mass of the neutrino.
... that astrophysicists have brushed under the carpet
To me, this article reeks of conspiracy theory; a valid, scientific critique or proposal has no need for using this kind of language.
Another thing is that the speed of light and its constancy in all inertial frames of reference is a fundamental tenet in all modern physics. It underpins the whole of relativity theory and it is crucial in the explanation of the equivalence between mass and energy; it even explains the colour of gold. In short: one has to be careful fiddling with it, because one will then have to find alternative explanations for A LOT OF OBSERVABLE FACTS.
So photon's act like matter at bit more often than we expected, right? How much of dark matter/dark energy problem can this phenomenon account for?
0x or or snor perron?!
Also, there's a semantic looseness as well that bothers me. The proposed solution doesn't really require changing the speed of light in a vacuum. Rather, it points out that photons will undergo certain interactions which mean that light as a bulk phenomenon will appear to go slower than the maximum speed light can travel in a vacuum because of those other interactions.
When computing relativistic effects, such as Lorenz contractions, etc., the upper speed (not including all those interactions) still remains the limit, at least as I understand it.
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This is a story about the speed of light being not what we thought it was, and involving general relativity, neutrinos, and its one data point from a unique astronomical event. Oh, yeaah, riiight. And yet, it is clearly explained, and stands a good chance of being right. I am definitely going to have my weird-o-meter recalibrated.
The speed of light is the same as it always was. Any given photon may, extremely rarely, split into an electron-positron pair, and then recombine. The electron and the positron are not travelling at the speed of light, so this event will stick in a small delay. If you measure the speed of light over most human experimental lengths, this event will be very rare - so the very occasional photon will show a tiny delay. If your light travels over such vast distances that the photon may have experienced so many of these delays that it spent whole hours as electrons and positrons.
Each photon will have a random number of these delay events, so you might expect the light pulse to get blurred out a bit by this randomness. There will be a slight blurring, but because the number of events is so huge, the fractional deviation from the mean is pretty tiny.
Cute, and neat. Some posters still try and argue for gravitational viscosity, or for faster-than-light neutrinos, or that this is a failure of science and only philosophers can help us now. Ho-hum. Too little fog, too late, chaps. Better luck with the next one, eh?
It would go up but would be re normalized in several years.
Time to offend someone
Relativity only actually requires that particles with mass stay on one side of the speed of light: strictly below or strictly above. The "strictly above" particles, which are entirely theoretical, are called tachyons.
Is that we have to redefine the definition of a vacuum. Clearly, most thing of a vacuum as an area containing no mass. However, we should implement a more exact definition of a vacuum as an area not influenced by mass. (gravity, being the long range influence of mass)
Remove the influence of mass (including gravity), and C remains constant. I wager physicists will much more readily accept redefining vacuum than C.
Franson's theory cannot be right, as it disagrees with the solar system tests of General Relativity
His Equation 18 predicts a change in the gravitational red shift by a factor of 9 alpha / 64 for photons, where alpha is the fine structure constant (~ 1/137), so the correction is ~ 1.08 x 10^-2. The gravitational red shift has been tested, by GPS and also by Gravity Probe A, with an accuracy of a few parts in 10^-4 (see Figure 3 in that reference). This excludes the Franson correction, and so his theory cannot be correct. Since the Shapiro delay also depends on the gravitational redshift, Franson's theory thus predicts a 1% change in that too, which is also much too large to be consistent with experiment (see Figure 5), again excluding the Franson theory.
So the theory is wrong, and the other problems I have with the paper are irrelevant.
If the photon turns into a pair of massy particles, shouldn't that fact alone slow it down? Anything with a mass can't move at the speed of light. Also, doesn't gravity affect light in a similar way as it affects particles with mass?
Looks like it's time for corrective lenses for photons so's they don't keep bumping into stuff...
Can a single photon turn into an electron/positron pair? I didn't think this was possible because a photon has no rest frame, whereas an e-/p+ pair always would. Thus, in the inertial frame in which the pair has no momentum (the "center of momentum" frame), the photon would still have momentum. Thus, momentum would not be conserved. You need two photons moving in different directions for the pair of photons to have a center-of-momentum frame in which their momenta cancel each other out.
If FTL travel was possible, then causality would have already been broken, and we would see the effects of it all the fucking time.
That is only true if the faster then light particle carries information. The way I heard it (and I don't remember where and whether it was much more then speculation) was that photons average the speed of light so they might go a bit faster, then a bit slower then c. There is also phenomena such as quantum entanglement that clearly show the speed of light being broken or bypassed with no information being transmitted faster then light. There are other quantum effects that also seem like they may be instant, unluckily it is really hard to measure speed at trillionths of an inch.
If the particle exists, then it carries information. A particle can't exist without interacting with the Universe in some way, and those interactions require information.
Neutrinos are affected by gravity. Everything is. And, so far as general relativity is concerned, the paths that objects travel along under the influence of gravity (and nothing else) ARE the closest thing to straight line paths that actually exist.
Theoretical is too strong a word to describe tachyons. Better to call them science fiction. Tachyons violate causality, and create some kinds of vacuum instability. They don't exist.
Neutrinos do not produce Cerenkov radiation (light booms, caused by traveling faster than light) in a vacuum, but they do in a fluid such as they do at neutrino detectors such as this one.
Cerenkov radiation when a particle travels faster than light in a given medium, such as a neutron can travel faster through water than light can but still travels slower than the speed of light in a vacuum.
If that isn't confusing, consider the article says light that always has to travel at the speed of light, can't travel at the speed of light because light isn't always light!
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Btw, exactly. Occam's razor http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/... cuts out any such superfluous bs from science. We have a solar neutrino problem, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... , we cannot detect all the neutrinos that are supposed to be flooding us from the Sun, so we suppose that they have a very weak interaction coefficient, but to really fit the graph, we need one more object concocted, a neutrino mass. My college professor said give me 19 independent variables, and I can fit an elephant with a graph. Give me 20, and I can accurately fit the tail too. Occam's razor is against such things. Observational evidence showing neutrinos propagating faster than light is exciting, not disheartening!
The real answer to the solar neutrino problem is that there is no fusion going on inside the Sun. Yeah, you heard that right, time to revise all science textbooks. Or how else do you explain that a tiny little object in the night sky sets off not one, but three neutrino detectors worldwide, but we keep listening to the neutrinos from the Sun and they ain't coming, when in fact the detectors should be flooded and drowned in solar neutrino signals, and ignore distant galaxy events. Fact is there is no fusion going on inside the Sun, the Sun is only hot for the same reason the inside of the Earth is hot: Thorium, Uranium 238 and 235, and Potassium-40. In fact that is why an asteroid is cold, the Moon has no molten lava, because it's too small, nor does Mars, or Mercury, but Venus is sufficiently large to possess one, Earth is larger, and Jupiter, underneath all that hydrogen, is probably even hotter than Earth, and so are probably Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, depending on the size of their silicate-cores. If you dumped a bunch of silicate asteroids with terrestrial abundance of thorium, uranium and potassium-40, together, into an Earth-sized mass, you'd get a planet with a molten inside, and a certain degree of surface temperature just from that, and total heat emissions. If you gathered enough similar asteroids and planets in extra-solar-system space, and dumped it all together to form an object the mass of the Sun, you'd pretty much get a Sun, with 5778 K surface temperature, not just molten volcano lava underneath a cold crust, but the whole surface would be volcano lava. Under such mass the gravity would be big enough to hold back even hydrogen, even at that 5800 K temperature, but as holding more and more back increases size, it increases gravity and increases compression and accelerates the nuclear reactor, i.e., the temperature goes up, and hydrogen gets boiled off and shot off as solar wind, and the Sun has a somewhat steady size, instead of an ever-growing one. Such compression/temperature rise cycles, blowing off hydrogen into outer space, it cooling by thermal radiation, falling back onto the Sun, with very long characteristic times, could explain ice-ages and global warming ages, as hydrogen can take a long trip all the way past Pluto, then stop, then get slowly accelerated back and fall back unto the Sun, and this whole thing could be steady state, but once in a while you have a massive comet or what not bring new fuel, or create a cold spot, or what not, and create minute fluctuations that could self amplify into full scale ice ages. But helium, being 4 times heavier than hydrogen, stays down, so the reason for the 75% hydrogen and 25% He in the Sun is a simple distillation process by molten lava down below, not a fusion conversion of hydrogen to helium, else our neutrino detectors would be screaming and not even noticing a distant SN1987A under the heavy noise. In fact when you look up in the sky and you see all the stars, that's pretty much all the matter there is in the Universe, so to speak, because if it gets massive, it gets hot by the natural abundance of nuclear isotopes, everything massive enough is a natural nuclear reactor fueled by the diffuse, trace, nuclear isotop
You are mixing up rest mass (which neither the photon nor the neutrino has) with moving mass / impulse
No, actually I'm not: trust me I'm a particle physicist! There are two misconceptions there. First a particle does not have to have a mass to have a momentum. Einstein's favourite equation is not actually 'E=mc^2' unless you are standing still. It is more correctly written: 'E^2=p^2c^2 + m^2c^4' where 'p' is momentum. In the case of a massless particle (m=0) this is just: 'E=pc' so a photon with a non-zero energy has a non-zero momentum but ALWAYS has a zero mass.
The second misconception is that the mass of a moving particle somehow changes. This is wrong and in fact you can show quite easily (if you know relativity) that the mass is something called a Lorentz invariant which means it is the same for all observers in all inertial reference frames. The misconception regarding the mass "getting bigger" at higher velocities comes from the formula for relativistic momentum for a massive particle "p=gamma*m*v" where 'gamma' is always greater than 1 for v>0. This factor is erroneously coupled with the mass to give what some textbooks call 'relativistic mass' (gamma*m). This is WRONG! One of the consequences of relativity is that space and time get 'mixed' differently for different observers. Velocity is 'space/time' so this is where the gamma factor comes from. This is very obvious to see if you look at acceleration. The relativistic form of Newton's second law is NOT 'F=gamma*m*a' which it would be if this was just an effect on the mass increasing.
You claim that a neutrino has always mass (or more than a photon) is either plain wrong or grants you a noble prize if you can proof it.
See this paper: “Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory”, The SNO Collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 1, 011301 (2002). It is not possible for neutrinos to oscillate unless they have a mass difference which means that at least two of the neutrino flavours must have a non-zero mass. You are correct that it is likely to win the authors a Nobel Prize probably within the next few years but I'm not one of them (but I was an author on the Higgs discovery paper so that's ok! ;-).
"moving mass" here is being used for poorly named relativistic mass, which is not an invariant. For both gravitational and inertial purposes, things act like their relativistic mass in a given frame, regardless of what their rest mass is.
Actually they do not. Try using 'F=ma' with relativistic mass and you will not get far. You can only use the simple 'gamma' factor when dealing with relativistic momentum and then, at a fundamental level, it comes from the fact that the particle's velocity has to be redefined for relativity because there is no universal clock. This is not a pedagogical argument it is a fundamental physics argument: relativistic mass is a broken concept, the universe simply does not work that way and you will go wrong if you use it in any but the simplest situations.
I beg to differ.
Where are these new detectors, and how do they detect different flavors of neutrinos? Neutrino detectors are humongous contraptions deep underground, most catching scintillations. There isn't much to "tune" to catch, and the 1987 event catching two different types of neutrinos from a single event (unless you have a theory of stage-wise double step collapse, the first one giving electron neutrinos, the second muon neutrinos, or even if same kind, but different kabooms) shows that old school detectors have no problem picking up small amounts of neutrinos from a tiny portion of the sky, and they interact just fine, and the stuff we measure as solar neutrinos is probably coming from actual neutrino producing things, but not our Sun.
Dark is much faster.
OK, let's assume the Sun has no hydrogen at all, and all its mass is made of the same material as Earth.
According to http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pla... the Sun is about 2e30 (i.e. 2x10^30) kg.
According to ditto, luminosity is 3.85E26 J/s, or W. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... the Earth's inner lava heat comes from
232 Th at 3.27E-12 W/kg mantle
238 U at 2.91E-12
40 K at 1.08E-12
235 U at 0.125E-12
Adding these up you get 7.39E-12 W/kg mantle. Multiplying by the solar mass you get 1.47E19 W, which is much less than the luminosity, by about 26E6 times.
Btw, at 3000 solar neutrinos a year, that's one every 2.92 hrs, out of the 10^28/s*3600*2.92=1.05E32 neutrinos per year (granted most of them fly off to somewhere else, the solid angle of Earth from the Sun is small.) With Avogadro number at 6.023E23, 1E28/s is 16603 moles of neutrino/s, or, on the ballpark of 1 hydrogen atom per neutrino at 16.6 kg/s converted, while the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... page has a picture saying the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen per second. So the fraction of hydrogen atoms fusing that produce a neutrino is that small? 620E9 kg/s vs. 16.6 kg/s?
I'm sleepy now, and I haven't even read the wikipedia page on neutrino detectors yet. But it's the weekend, I'll read up on it, and maybe post more later.
I've had thoughts about how we assume that extragalactic space is pure vacuum, when it might actually be pretty dense gas compared to what we think it is, and that could explain why so many galaxies are spiral (spiral galaxies are like fish-swirls on the surface of a pond, when there was no rotation to begin with, just a downward sinking motion, rotation, angular momentum, and swirls generated by the sinking from slight instabilities) and vacuum happens only where the extragalactic smooth uniform gas-soup collapses gravitationally, kind of like throwing a magnet on an iron dust filled paper, it's vacuum near the magnet, and there might be a minimum vacuum point in the solar system), why they lost track of the Voyager probes (true the antenna distance was huge, but it might have been an aerodynamic drag by the weak vacuum,) why extra solar system spaceships then need to be aerodynamic with shuttle like reentry heat shields, and then how other fast flying objects out there impacting this ever permeating "dark energy" hydrogen soup would glow from shuttle like reentry heat shield effects, or shooting star meteorite heating effects, stuff you see on a lot of astronomical pictures (the heat in the rings might be partly exploding material, but what if it wasn't originally glowing when it was propelled to high speed - I don't know, can such a thing be out there? Like what's the temperature of a black hole, can it be cold and can that explode? So anyway, if there is aerodynamic drag past Pluto, then the Voyager probes have a finite distance from us where they will stop due to that drag, and interstellar travel then requires continuous propulsion and very low speeds, but possibly abundant fuel everywhere.
What are the proofs that extragalactic space is full vacuum? Even if all matter has coalesced into mostly galaxies, quite a bit may still be out there, and the vacuum inside galaxies might be stronger than outside them. us Still, what kind of rate of neutrinos does a calibration device generate, and do you have to wait like a whole year before you pick up a signal?
Like Saturn's rings haven't collapsed gravitationally, what's keeping that strange thing stable? Any good math? Yeah, from google I see Maxwell went at it, that's another yummi thing to read up on this weekend.
10 to 1000 atoms per cubic meter is really deep vacuum and it means we could get interstellar travel by going really fast, continuously accelerating with a cyclotron drive to close to speed of light, say 80%, then turn to decelerating halfway there.
Your arguments are sound. A lot of stuff out there would mean a blue sky everywhere, as gases do Rayleigh scattering of light. And once you go past our atmosphere, the rest of the Universe is black, not blue, the blue sky disappears, therefore there is deep vacuum everywhere, or at least small particle free space, and then you have to invent something else that is particle free but present in vacuum and retards photons compared to neutrinos, such as gravity, or dark energy, or whatnot.
Photons interact a lot with "subspace" vacuum and get delayed, but neutrinos do not, or not to the same extent. If you're absolutely certain that neutrinos can oscillate, and there are different kinds that can turn into each other, then having two pulses does not make sense if they were both from the same event, as any different neutrinos should have oscillated into each other and be indistinguishable. One question, when we talk of photons, it's hard to talk about polarization, but we know light is a transverse wave and polarized. Obviously neutrinos have an associated wave-particle duality to them, just like everything else, and do we know what kind of waves they are? Longitudinal, or transverse? If they are transverse waves, then there could be neutrino polarization, and just like with light birefringence in a calcite crystal, where an incoming uniformly random polarized wave splits into a fast and a slow beam, based on polarization, so if the space between us and the supernova is anisotropic in any sense, such as gravity pointing in certain direction throughout, and neutrinos be polarized transverse waves, then there could be a fast and a slow wave with them, but not so with the light wave, unless they had polarized light receptors and have info on the polarization makeup of the light received vs. time (and this would be low intensity for a while, then intensity doubling when the slow beam arrives too and adds to the fast one, as light emission was continuous with a slow decay, but the neutrino came in pulses.) So if gravity affects the speed of light, and affects it in a birefringent way, it may also affect the speed of neutrinos, if they are transverse polarized, in a birefringent way too, and then none of the signals really arrived at the speed of light, but slower, as in a calcite crystal even the fast wave still has a reduced speed from true speed of light.
By the way I still don't comprehend the concept of how a uniformly polarized beam decides to split into two in a calcite crystal, instead of a spread spectrum, like how does a wave just below 44.9 degrees decide to go with one beam, then one at 45.1 degrees with the other beam, or is that the cutoff point, the math must be really complicated, but a lot of XIX century mathematicians well versed in such things would probably have no problem explaining why.
Also, looking at the double slit experiments, an electron is a wave that passes through both holes, then it decides to collapse at some point on the screen, how does a wave decide to become a particle, or even if not a particle, an interaction, in effect we have no particles, just waves, and they interact at given points, sometimes within very strict limits on location, such as a particle trace in a cloud chamber, sometimes in very random locations, such as where an electron collapses on a screen after having passed through a double slit. Many double slits in series of course would confine the electron to a linear path too, just like a cloud chamber cloud does, if the electron found a way to not interact with the walls in series, a sort of filtering effect. One that interacts with the wall off angle through diffraction then changes its mind and returns to being an electron on the original straight path, would be like the particle going through the
Now I woke up, if I don't think hard I'm not that sleepy - so apropo blue sky, I had this thought right before falling asleep that don't we have evidence that the farther a star or galaxy is, the more red shifted they are? As in the more Rayleigh scattering the farther away they are, and we may not really see the blue sky as blue, but we can tell from a red shifted star that it lost a lot of blue ? But I know redshift is due to Doppler effect, and all the known spectral lines move, in unison, according to the Doppler formula, as opposed to just simply being selectively filtered out in a wavelength dependent way due to Rayleigh scattering, according to the Rayleigh formula, so no, the redshift is not due to extra stuff, but speed.
By the way, if light, as it travels, creates these Heisenberg uncertainty fluctuation particle/antiparticle pairs, why don't these particle/antiparticle pairs Rayleigh self-scatter light, as in one photon goes through this slowdown, and scatters the 2nd photon (or more exactly wave packet, wave quantum) coming right behind it? That could be part of the explanation of redshift of distant galaxies, as opposed to them running faster the farther away they are, creating this Big Bang picture, they might be sitting still and light simply traveling long long long distances self-scatters in a Rayleigh way and somehow coming out of the scattering it actually shifts the atomic emission band frequency down as opposed to just filter it? Can you pull off or eke out such an explanation? I really don't like the theory where very distant galaxies are running away faster than the speed of light from us, in our reference frame, and it's OK as long as our 3D Universe is a volume on a 4D sphere, stretching very fast, and locally, everywhere you still have limited speed of light.
And how do you describe particle antiparticle pairs as wave-antiwave packets? There may really not be such a thing as a particle, and everything is just a certain vibration of "ether", with specific rules of what kinds of vibrations are allowed, and how the vibrations suddenly collapse, and there is no such thing as a "transformation" of a photon into a million kind of particle/antiparticle pairs, but more like a vibration encountering an already present fluctuation, and interacting with it. Vacuum might have a structure that allows certain types of wave packets with definite rules and axioms that interact through collapses of the wave that spread over an entire galaxy, at a single nanosized point on a screen, and string theory might be beating around the bush, but it requires 26 or so dimensions rolled up, and Occam's razor is very eager to cut crap with 26 dimensions. Btw we can thank a lot of Occam's razor http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/.... Through it we killed phlogiston, caloric, vis viva and ether as useless concepts. Phlogiston got killed by Lavoisier, Mr. Oxygen and his wife in 1778 (Jean Michel Jarre has an album titled Oxygen), "vis viva" got killed by Wohler in 1828 by making "organic" urea out of "inorganic" ammonium cyanate, organic materials previously thought to have require life-force, or vis viva to be created. Caloric (which, btw, was introduced by Lavoisier himself, such is science, you win some, you lose some, oh well) was killed by Joule in 1843, showing that heat is not a conserved fluid, but can be generated. And Einstein and his wife killed the concept of "ether" in 1905 based on the Michelson-Morley experiment trying to measure the speed of Earth through ether with unprecedented accuracy with a superb interferometer suspended on a pool of mercury in 1879 at Western Reserve University. When you had man/woman duos doing the work, as in Einstein or Lavoisier, it's probably impossible to separate the individual contributions of the two, and assign credit as credit is due, 35% going to one person, 65% to the other. By the way Lavoisier's head rolled during the French Revolution, because he made a living through the tax office, concocting even better ways to extort even more money out of the people. And during the guillotine sessions, when a whole lot of nobility family trees were instantly trimmed, before chopped some heads were told to keep blinking as long as possible after they are chopped, and they could do it for about 35 seconds before giving out. So even getting your head chopped is not instant death, and hanging is probably not so either, there is mental awareness, anguish and agony for at least 35 seconds. Lethal injection, preparing the inmate, tying him down, that creates a lot of stress right there, and probably the most humane way of execution is not telling a death row inmate when he's gonna go, gassing him in his cell/chamber with anesthetics, then wi
I pass way to many typos these days. Like piece/peace. Sometimes it feels like as I type below, somebody keeps changing the stuff I typed above. You can not trust these newer browsers with xmlhttprequest and html 4 dom not changing stuff on the fly for you, without a page reload, as you type.
By the way the Inca's are the most fervent Catholics in the whole world these days. During Easter they reenact the crucifixion of Christ, by some people actually getting nailed to a cross and bleeding, and they get carried around like that on a procession. That bloody gore fits in line well with their ancient traditions of human sacrifices. Both the Inca's and Aztecs practiced human sacrifices up to the time of the arrival of conquistadors, and while the Aztecs as an empire disappeared from an economic collapse from overgrowing past their resource limits (just like Angkor Wat collapsed near VietNam), the people remained, scattered about in the jungle, living subsistence lives, without much complex science and technology or art or religion. The Inca's on the other hand were just done conquering the neighborhood, they were at the apex of their powers when they had the bad luck of the conquistadors arriving, bringing the "brotherly love" of Jesus on the cross to them, in the form of a sword. That's what you call hypocrisy, btw.
The real issue with Rayleigh self scattering of light is that it does not explain red shift. The energy has to go somewhere, something has to take it, unless a photon turns into a particle/antiparticle, it Rayleigh-scatters the photon coming behind it to a red-shifted frequency (scattering is a filtering, not a frequency-shifting like Doppler) then the particle/antiparticle emit in a laser-way another photon, then go back to their original state of a photon. In this way red shift would mean increasing the intensity of light while decreasing the frequency, instead of 2 photons that are, say, blue, you'd end up with 3 photons that are red, all with very close frequencies. I don't think the math could do that. By the way I never really got why in laser, a light of the same frequency triggers the spontaneous emission of inverted populations, in a pulse. Why? Why can't it be a light of higher or lower frequency that triggers the collapse? And if it's a triggered collapse, then how do continuous lasers, like the laser pointer on my keychain, work? Many triggered pulses in sequence? Or the semiconductor is just efficient in putting a lot of electrons into the high state? Why is one LED just an LED, of a definite nm wavelength light, another one a laser LED, with a similar nm wavelength, what makes one a laser but not the other? See, there is lots of stuff I don't know.
As far as the Dirac equation and the like goes, I know it modified the Schroedinger equation with special relativity, and because of the squared term, you had two solutions, plus and minus, and that's how the positron was discovered, and matter/antimatter in general. But still, it does not have any more info on wavefunction particle-like behavior, called collapse, more than the Schroedinger equation does. See light used to be thought of as electromagnetic waves, until Einstein explained the photoelectric effect via particles, that only particles can be counted as 1, 2, 3. I feel the particle description lacks richness, compared to a wave description, that spreads over the entire galaxy then collapses at a single point of interaction. It's like describing something as both scalar and vector, and the vector description is the "correct" one, because it has more features, and scalars are just a particular sub-case of vectors. When we model the world around us, we can come up with better and better models, but even as Einstein said it, some new theory may come and replace the existing ones, only relegating them to relevance through correspondence principle ways, such as Newtonian mechanincs, at low speed, corresponds to special relativity at low speed, and special relativity is just an extension of the rules for those special cases. All Plack derived is that energy is emitted and arrives in packets, not whether it's particles or waves, and as far as we know it, wave-packet is what he got. A wave packet can have a polarization attribute, just like a photon-wave-packet, but how do you assign polarization to the other de-Broglie wave things? De Broglie does not specify whether the waves are transverse or longitudinal, and for photons we know they are transverse, but what about the rest? The clearest evidence of waves being better descriptors with richer sets of features, better models, is the electron diffraction double slit experiment. The single electron whose wave function collapses at a single point on the screen, went through both holes, it knows about both holes on an individual basis, it self diffracts. You cannot explain such behavior with any kind of limited to a point in space particle feature, but a spread out all over the friggin universe wave that goes through both holes at the same time, then collapses the whole wave from the whole universe at a single point, seems like a fitting an suitable description. They shouldn't talk about particle science and particle physics, all you got it wavelet, wave-chunk, wave-quanta physics. It explains the photoelectric effect, polarization behavior of photons, it explains lots of things. Ultimately no model is per