Author Topic: Not so fast afterall  (Read 7300 times)

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Offline Shano

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Re: Not so fast afterall
« Reply #15 on: February 24, 2012, 07:31:57 pm »
Here's the thing, though.  No matter how incomplete our knowledge of science is, it works.  We still mark diagrams positive to negative because building a circuit that way works (though for different reasons than we originally thought).  Newtonian physics was proven wrong (or at least incomplete) by relativity, but it's still useful to a large degree.

New discoveries aren't going to make us throw away everything we know, they're just going to force us to refine further, to figure out where and why there are exceptions.  If neutrinos did move faster than light, that doesn't throw everything we know out the window.  It just means that there's one instance where things don't work the way we expect it to.  We still know many, many places where it does work the way we expect, because we have years of experiments behind us proving it.  The fact that quantum physics counters so many previously held notions didn't make all previously known physics useless.  So no, it wouldn't be terrible, awful news if the neutrinos had traveled faster than light.  It's not terrible awful news that they didn't, either.  It's just another step along the way to understanding the universe. 

That unfortunately is incorrect. While the upgrade from Newtonian to special relativity is just an upgrade this is because the former is (as you say) an limiting case of the latter. The concept of the speed of light however is fundamental, fundamentally philosophical and deeply conceptual for the physics of the last 100 year. Breaking it will not just require an upgrade of special relativity - everything will need to be re-explained, because it permeats everything.
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Offline gyeonghwa

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Re: Not so fast afterall
« Reply #16 on: February 24, 2012, 09:54:22 pm »
"Sorry we don't serve particles that are faster than light. A neutrino walks into a bar. . ."
/joke
That may be the single gayest thing I have ever read on this board. Or the old one. ;)

Offline Undecided

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Re: Not so fast afterall
« Reply #17 on: February 25, 2012, 02:04:49 am »
Here's the thing, though.  No matter how incomplete our knowledge of science is, it works.  We still mark diagrams positive to negative because building a circuit that way works (though for different reasons than we originally thought).  Newtonian physics was proven wrong (or at least incomplete) by relativity, but it's still useful to a large degree.

New discoveries aren't going to make us throw away everything we know, they're just going to force us to refine further, to figure out where and why there are exceptions.  If neutrinos did move faster than light, that doesn't throw everything we know out the window.  It just means that there's one instance where things don't work the way we expect it to.  We still know many, many places where it does work the way we expect, because we have years of experiments behind us proving it.  The fact that quantum physics counters so many previously held notions didn't make all previously known physics useless.  So no, it wouldn't be terrible, awful news if the neutrinos had traveled faster than light.  It's not terrible awful news that they didn't, either.  It's just another step along the way to understanding the universe. 

That unfortunately is incorrect. While the upgrade from Newtonian to special relativity is just an upgrade this is because the former is (as you say) an limiting case of the latter. The concept of the speed of light however is fundamental, fundamentally philosophical and deeply conceptual for the physics of the last 100 year. Breaking it will not just require an upgrade of special relativity - everything will need to be re-explained, because it permeats everything.
It is true that a confirmed violation of special relativity would destroy the foundation of both the Standard Model and general relativity. However, you can create an effective theory starting with a Lorentz-invariant theory and postulating post-Lorentzian corrections just in the same way that you might start with a Newtonian theory and subsequently postulate post-Newtonian corrections (http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v69/i10/e105009). Furthermore, you can organize the experimental data in such a fashion as to provide upper limits on what these corrections might be (http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v83/i1/p11_1).

[I'm just playing devil's advocate, obviously. I don't really expect a violation of special relativity anytime soon.]
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Offline Shano

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Re: Not so fast afterall
« Reply #18 on: February 25, 2012, 10:28:33 am »
Yet, post-Lorenzian effective theories do not deal with issues of units definitions and the fundamentals of measurements. Going from newtonian to post-newtonian never affected those. (The measurement issue was one of my earliest gripes at the OPERA - the GPS system explicitly uses special and general relativity as we know them - so if your result suggests that parts of your experiment rely on a wrong theory...)
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