If you haven't heard about the stunning result from CERN this week, a few slippery little particles were busted breaking an important speed limit. The particles were muon neutrinos produced at CERN, some of which went flying off in the direction of a neutrino detecter hundreds of miles away. Velocity is distance divided by time, simple enough, except in this case that velocity works out to slightly more than the
speed of light, about 186,282 miles per second. That causes all sorts of problems in physics, which is why many of us reading about the experiment, dubbed
OPERA, agree with Sean Carroll's
healthy skepticism:
I don’t mean to impugn the abilities or honesty of the experimenters, who are by all accounts top-notch people trying to do something very difficult. It’s just a very difficult experiment, and given that the result is so completely contrary to our expectations, it’s much easier at this point to believe there is a hidden glitch than to take it at face value. All that would instantly change, of course, if it were independently verified by another experiment; at that point the gleeful jumping up and down will justifiably commence.
- A lock of hair 100 years old and some of the latest techniques in molecular biology suggest Australian aborigines are the closest genetic match fo the first anatomically modern humans who left Africa over 50,000 years ago.
- Science marches on! New battery technology greatly extends the life and capacity of lithium storage devices.
- Why is the GOP rejection of science so diagnostic of the entire party? John Cole fucking nails it:
How do you have a sensible policy debate with people who reject basic facts? It’s like trying to debate members of a cargo cult- the modern GOP carry the crosses but have no idea what it means to be christian. They talk about free markets, but have no understanding of economics. Just say deregulate and tax cuts a lot, and MAGIC WILL HAPPEN. Evolution? LIES! Climate change? LIES! Modern Medicine and vaccines? LIES!
