Even the most serious minded attempt to explain curved space and black holes leaves me vaguely puzzled. And I had never understood Einstein’s contention – presuming that he made it – that nothing could move faster than light. Why? It appeared to me more of a theological statement than a measaured fact. Why? Of course, I can see it has ramifications for our observation of the universe, but why should it not be possible? I have wondered about this article of faith from time to time.
Now CERN have apparently measured some sub-atomic particles moving a bit faster than light. How jolly clever of them. I still don’t understand why they should not have been able to do that, and don’t feel anything much has changed now they have. What do we need now to adjust in our understanding of the universe? I just went to the Post Office, and it was still there.
Yes, I know Bonnie Tyler is singing “night”.
Suhayl, there are some things that we may not wish to subvert, like (but not much like) the choice of refraining to express our freedom of speech to shout “Fire!” during a theatrical performance.
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The conditions for free will are that the future must be changeable but unknowable, and the past must be knowable but unchangeable.
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If a person were to travel faster than light, they would have no choice but to do so. They could find themselves at their destination before they had decided to leave their point of departure, thus being left with no choice but to make the journey. Absolutely no choice, like choice becomes meaningless, something that never existed, had never been known. Such a person would be a passive object, not a willful entity.
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Be careful what you wish for.
“contradicting causation”
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Not necessarily. There’s the ‘multiple universes’ theory, where every instant has an infinite number of futures so that a return to the past merely forces you to follow a different path into the future – no paradoxes encountered. Fourmilab has been mentioned. Its owner (John Walker, founder of AutoDesk – I was once an AutoCAD developer) has a novel explanation for psychokinesis: the agent (or psychic) does not actually cause an object to move by the exertion of mystical powers, but simply (!) selects a path into a future where the object has moved.
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For my money, the weirdest idea is that of an infinite universe. Logic would seem to require that since the number of ways in which you can arrange stuff is finite (constrained by the laws of physics) then every possible arrangement must be repeated an infinite number of times (no matter how often you roll a dice you can only get ones, twos, threes, fours, fives and sixes). Somewhere there is a Clark, a Mary, a Canspeccy, a Larry from an unimaginably distant St Louis (but still not distant enough), a Suhhayl, an Anno, everyone else – and of course a Craig – all busily blogging exactly the same stuff as here. And as I’ve just demonstrated – they know about us.
Clark, the way they explained it last night was that neutrinos are the only particles (if the readings are correct, and some have doubts about that) that can travel faster than light. It would be impossible therefore for a human-being to travel faster than light unless a human being was made solely of neutrinos. If neutrinos can travel faster than light could they be the factors in telepathy and other unexplained phenomena? I’m thinking of your comment regarding 9/11 and subsequent research findings.
John, yeah, neutrinos are about as close to nothing as you can get while still having something, so if anything can shave one forty-thousandth off the speed of light, it’d be neutrinos. But neutrinos from distant supernovae don’t seem to have exceeded c, so I reckon that either it’s an error, or the answer will prove more interesting than “we’ve broken the cosmic speed limit”.
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It’s funny how people react to the light-speed “limit”. Most sci-fi writers just ignore it, like it’s just a technological problem that was overcome long before the period in which they set their story. Many people seem indignant, like they discovered that God is a traffic cop and they don’t like it, and are really gleeful if they find a loophole.
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Hardly anyone notices the gift inherent in the same equations. Given sufficient energy, you can get to any place in the universe in very little time. Light-speed journeys take no time at all for the traveller. It’s not a free gift, though. In the instant that you make your journey, the rest of the universe ages as many years as the distance (in light years) that you travelled. Travelling back across that distance has the same effect again. So you can travel as far forward in time as you wish, but you couldn’t then “return to the present”.
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My own view on “telepathy” is that it’s rather like quantum teleportation. Some entangled state becomes shared, but it’s meaning cannot be known until classical communication occurs and collapses the wave function (or something). This also fits with weird telephone synchronicity, when we think of someone just as the telephone rings, and it’s them.
Off topic. Saleh returns to Yemen from Saudi Arabia. In Sanaa, 17 are dead in government attack.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15044857.
Craig Murray: It appeared to me more of a theological statement than a measaured fact.
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It’s not a theological statement in any way.
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Mary: How about spontaneous combustion in Galway?
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The coroner in question seems to have (willfully?) misunderstood a forensic pathology text. If you don’t know how someone died it would be better off to say so rather than attribute the cause of death to divine retribution/magic.
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Clark: Light-speed journeys take no time at all for the traveller.
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The nearest star to our solar system is about four light-years away. I would hardly call that “no time at all”.
Mary, thanks for the Chernobyl Children International link. It is good that the site counters the ubiquitous pro-nuclear propaganda.
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The design of the Chernobyl plant was severely compromised in order to produce military plutonium quickly, and for low cost. Thus, I consider the victims of Chernobyl to be victims of the Cold War.
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The majority of power reactors worldwide are Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) and Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs). These designs were prioritised by the US, despite the objections of Alvin Weinberg, who was the major contributor to the PWR design. Weinberg favoured the development of Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) burning thorium rather than uranium, on the grounds of safety, greatly reduced waste production, and the elimination of plutonium from the fuel cycle and thus reduced potential for weapons manufacture. Weinberg criticised his own PWR design on the grounds of safety. Consequently, Weinberg was sidelined and sacked with the words, “Alvin, if you’re so concerned about reactor safety, maybe it’s time you left nuclear power”.
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The major incentive for the US’s decision to cease development of MSRs was, again, the desire to produce military plutonium. The BWR and PWR designs went on to become the predominant commercial reactors. So the Three Mile Island accident and the Fukushima disaster should both be attributed to a combination of the Cold War and the powerful inertia of the Military Industrial Complex.
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Decades of nuclear power generation has produced hundreds of thousands of tonnes of “spent fuel waste” – this is partly-used fuel, over 95% of the energy is still in the fuel rods when they have to be removed from the reactor before they disintegrate. The only method of making this “waste” safe is by further nuclear reactions. Reactors should be developed to do this, utilising the wasted 95% of energy to generate electricity in the same process. Instead, governments press on with building reactors that will produce yet more of the stuff.
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Mary, do you have a link for the current UK policy on ordering new nuclear power stations?
Angrysoba, it takes no time at all for the travellers, but when they get there and look out at the rest of the universe, it has aged by four years. (Or they can watch it age fast as they travel, but it will be severely blue-shifted so they’ll need a special viewer.)
Angrysoba, you’re all out of kilter.
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Craig said it appeared to be an article of faith. Like you, he hadn’t had it explained to him what it’s like for something moving at light speed. At light speed, the traveller gets there instantly. How could you possibly do it faster? You’d have to arrive before you left, so you’d experience having two conciousnesses for a while, whatever that means. It isn’t like you could try to go faster but fail, like wading through treacle. It’s so fast that it takes no time.
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What’s your source on the coroner’s statement? I thought that the coroner specifically disowned “divine retribution/magic”.
“At light speed, the traveller gets there instantly”
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I must be missing something here. I thought that at light speed a traveller gets there at the speed of light.
MJ, yes, they move at light speed when seen from outside the vehicle. You know the Twins Paradox? They don’t age on the journey; they don’t experience as much time as is observed from outside.
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That’s relativity. Time passes at different rates for different observers, depending upon their motion. Watching the occupants of the vehicle from outside, they age slowly and their watches run slow. The occupants experience on-board time completely normally, but when they look out of the ship, what they see looks speeded up. Look at this table:
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http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/flythru.html
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Note that, say, from day 110 to day 120, ten days on board, the ship passes through over ten light-years of the galaxy.
Another way to look at it, supplementing Clark’s excellent account, is in terms of energy. When something is accelerated, its mass (that is, its resistance to being accelerated) increases, and so it needs ever more energy to produce a given increase in speed. To get to the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy, and so it that speed can never be reached. Only particles with zero mass, such as the photon, the particle of light, escape this limitation. They need no energy to accelerate them, and so they always travel at the speed of light. It was long thought that the neutrino had zero mass, but now it is thought to hve a very small mass, and should therefore be travelling at less than the speed of light, not more.
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The reason this ‘discovery’ would cause such consternation if it were confirmed, is that everything that has been discovered in physics in the last century has been consistant with the theory of relativity to a very high degree of accuracy. For example, the theory of electrons in atoms, which underlies the whole of materials science, chemistry (and hence biology) and electronics. If relativity is wrong, how can everything derived from it be so right?
Clark. National Energy Policy here on separate pdfs for different sources. \I was not aware that there had been ‘consulations’.
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http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/meeting_energy/consents_planning/nps_en_infra/nps_en_infra.aspx
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National Policy Statements for energy infrastructure
On 18th July 2011 the House of Commons debated and approved the six National Policy Statements for Energy (NPS). On 19th July 2011, Chris Huhne, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change designated the NPSs under the Planning Act 2008[External link].
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The energy NPSs set out national policy against which proposals for major energy projects will be assessed and decided on by the Infrastructure Planning Commission. In future, if the changes to the Planning Act 2008 set out in the Localism Bill[External link] are enacted, they will also be the primary documents for the new Major Infrastructure Planning Unit (within the Planning Inspectorate) to use in its examination of applications for development consent, and for Ministers when making decisions.
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Designation of the energy NPSs will ensure that we have a planning system that is rapid, predicable and accountable. Planning decisions will be taken within the clear policy framework set out in the NPSs, making these decisions as transparent as possible.
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The energy NPSs designated on 19th July 2011 are:
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EN-1 Overarching Energy NPS [filetype:PDF filesize: 960.06Kb]
EN-2 Fossil Fuel Electricity Generating Infrastructure NPS [filetype:PDF filesize: 232.06Kb]
EN-3 Renewable Energy Infrastructure NPS [filetype:PDF filesize: 344.8Kb]
EN-4 Gas Supply Infrastructure & Gas and Oil Pipelines NPS [filetype:PDF filesize: 289.82Kb]
EN-5 Electricity Networks Infrastructure NPS [filetype:PDF filesize: 322.06Kb]
En-6 Nuclear Power Generation NPS – Volume I [filetype:PDF filesize: 312.2Kb]
En-6 Nuclear Power Generation NPS – Volume II [filetype:pdf filesize: 7742.9Kb]
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Prior to designation, the energy NPSs were subject to two rounds of Parliamentary Scrutiny and public consultation. The previous Government consulted on the draft energy NPSs between November 2009 and February 2010. The second consultation was conducted between 18th October 2010 and 24th January 2011. Material relating to these consultations can be found at the Energy National Policy Statement (NPS) consultation archive[External link].
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The Government response to Parliament, Government response to consultation and impact assessment can be accessed:
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Government response to consultation [filetype:pdf filesize: 829.29Kb]
Government response to Parliament [filetype:pdf filesize: 337.57Kb]
Impact assessment [filetype:pdf filesize: 218.55Kb]
@clark
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Why did the global consciousness thingy react to 9/11 where 3000 people died, but not to (for example) the 2004 tsumani which killed a quarter of a million? It looks culturally biased. But if it only reacts to 3,000 or more American deaths, why doesn’t it react to their annual road death statistics?
Mary, thanks.
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Vronsky, I could hazard guesses, like, 9/11 involved malign human motive, whereas the tsunami didn’t; on 9/11 the aircraft passengers were used as part of the ammunition, which probably provoked particularly strong moral outrage. The road deaths are spread out across the year, so I don’t know how you’d test for them. I wrote to one of the ringleaders, and asked if annual migration patterns showed any deviations; I can’t remember the answer. Have you checked that it didn’t deviate for the tsunami? Have you tried Fourmilab’s Retro Psychokinesis Experiment? I haven’t.
Vronsky, it probably has less to do with cultural bias and more with perception management and zionist controlled media.
Clark: Angrysoba, it takes no time at all for the travellers, but when they get there and look out at the rest of the universe, it has aged by four years. (Or they can watch it age fast as they travel, but it will be severely blue-shifted so they’ll need a special viewer.)
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Ah yes! Actually, I remember now that a character in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End goes through this experience when he stowsaway on an Overlords’ ship.
Im quite suspicious about that princeston noosphere stuff which seems to consist of ‘scrying’ through the output of random number generators for curiousities. The very first scry they describe on the page, “911 Formal Analysis”, is most plainly a slightly odd random artifact > “The final probability for the formal hypothesis test was 0.028, which is equivalent to an odds ratio of 35 to one against chance.”
All the graphs provided are confined to the most flattering timeframes, most of the calculated p-values are unremarkable, and a mention or two of stronger p-values, are only briefly noted.
It makes the kind of argument which cannot be dismissed on its own terms, but all it is saying is these random numbers looked a bit odd, here and here and in this way and that way.
Maybe there is something to be studied about coincidences, but i don’t find it impressively illustrated or documented there, and it was polemic and unhelpful to mix it up with the fog of 911.
Clark: What’s your source on the coroner’s statement? I thought that the coroner specifically disowned “divine retribution/magic”.
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Any meaningful definition of spontaneous human combustion involves no outside source for burning and the coroner specifically cites Bernard Knight as an authority in giving the cause of death as “spontaneous human combustion”. His mis-reading seems to come from the fact that Knight himself mentions that such cases typically take place beside an open-fire or have some other likely source of the burning. The coroner seems to miss the point of what Knight is saying. But here’s a link to a book by Bernard Knight. It’s quite explicit what Knight means:
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http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hTh69c5ujCEC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&dq=Bernard+Knight+spontaneous+combustion&source=bl&ots=LFwcMY1Go_&sig=X3WTAiBVYbi0ydqTOWXU5ucrmtg&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
@sunflower
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Zionist, I don’t know, but possibly perception management, certainly selective reporting. There is a table of ‘hits’ by the GCP linked below which includes things like record home runs at baseball. You’d think there would be a countering effect on the GCP from people like me who are profoundly uninterested in such things.
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Clark, I haven’t tried the retro-psychokinesis experiment at fourmilab – perhap you’d like to comment on the results he reports? I’m no statistician, but don’t the the low z-values mean little variation from chance expectation?
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http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html
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@angrysoba
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If Wiki is to be believed the term ‘spontaneous combustion’ can be used when the source of ignition is unknown, without implying dark forces at work. I broadly agree, though – it was a very surprising term for a professional to use, who you’d think would be aware of its spooky connotations. They’ll be telling us next that David Kelly committed suicide.
If I am not mistaken, which I quite likely am, nothing is believed to travel faster than light (unless it does, e.g., a tachyon) because C appears as a constant in Maxwell’s transformation equations. That being the case, faster-than-light travel would mean travel backward in time and thus the temporal inversion of cause and effect.
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So it was not really Einstein who introduced weirdness into physics, but James Clerk Maxwell (and Michelson and Morley, who demonstrated the constant velocity of light). Einstein’s achievement was to reveal the queer consequences of the earlier developments.
Angrysoba, I suppose the coroner could be citing the very passage that you linked to, in which case he would simply be using the same terminology – the title of that section is “Spontaneous Combustion” – and rather than implying anything supernatural he’d merely be classifying this case with other, similarly perplexing but apparently well-documented cases.
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A friend of mine (a Fortean Times reader) suggested that old-fashioned moth-balls, made from naphthalene, could be contributory to such cases; clothing infused with naphthalene would be highly flammable.
Crab, the GCP “predictions” have to be defined before examining the data. Researchers aren’t supposed to just trawl through the data and pick out the bits that look juicy. They could have been cheating, of course.
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The reason I found it interesting regarding 9/11 is that I had such strong feelings of premonitions that day; I was sort of waiting for the second aircraft impact at the WTC, and I had a sort of “oh, there it goes” feeling when the collapse of WTC7 was later announced. On the recent “11th of September” thread, John Goss described his feelings that day. I dunno…
I think we can already see from the comments here that this is a Big Deal, because lots of extremely interesting questions about the “true” character, or nature, of the universe and “reality” literally leap out at one. This discovery could turn science inside out and lead to “revolutionary” changes we can only glimpse faintly at the moment.
For example the link between cause and effect, if this is “problematic” or “reversable” then how do we explain this?
A fundamental building block of modern science and physics, the speed on light and the “dogma” that nothing can exceed it, may have to be modified or re-explained, which might lead to radically different perspecitves about what is “real” and what isn’t.
The paradox is that this discovery may show us how little we really know about the nature of the universe.
I think we can assume that the measurements are accurate. That isn’t the main area of controversy. What’s interesting is not the measurement, but the… “how the hell” bit of the puzzle.
How are the neutrino’s doing it? Are they taking a short cut and cheating light? Are they slipping through a wormhole, or gap in the 69th dimension? So many questions.
Shame that premonition feeling failed to reach you for the first strike on the North tower, Clark, in time to evacuate the building or even better before the ‘equipment’ was wired into the 90th floor of the South tower during the preceding weekend power-down.
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If particles exist that travel faster than light this is perhaps bad news for the 20 or so humanoids that implemented the sensational collapse of the WTC complex. It would be possible using a neutrino communicated to send signals back in time with the correct reference frame coordinates to warn people of the 911 plot before it was executed.
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Mmmm now where are my notes on Lorentz transformation?
Oh there’s an error all right. It’s the photons that are wandering about zigzagging along in wave formation as they always do. No such dithering from your neutrinos, straight to the point they are. I mean I ask you who do you think gets there first, a gang of neutrinos on a promise going to a bunga bunga party in Italy or a group of flashy look-at-me photons doing the conga along the autostrada?
I think the neutrino results should be celebrated, if they withstand scrutiny and replication.
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This could potentially pave the way towards reconciling relativity with quantum mechanics – a phenomenon which also thumbs its nose at the speed of light constraint: Einstein couldn’t accept the Heisenberg principle or Bell’s inequality. One possibility, elaborated by superstring mathematics but not yet discovered empirically, is that subatomic wave/particles may resonate in dimensions unknown to atomic-level physics. It’s an intriguing possibility.
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Of course, finding limitations in physical laws doesn’t revoke them at the level they previously applied. GPS devices won’t suddenly stop working, so the average Post Office punter doesn’t need to panic. However, the potential paradigm shift is important to particle physicists but also epistemologists. Knowledge advances in revolutions as well as incremental steps.
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Einstein, like Newton before him, was standing on the shoulders of giants. Maxwell and Michelson/Morley paved the way for special relativity – once you accept that light travels at a constant rate (which was a breakthrough in its time), relativity arises as a natural consequence. Hermann Bondi’s book ‘Relativity and Common Sense’ explains it well, using illustrated thought experiments. Bondi was asked whether anything could travel faster than the speed of light: he responded that we wouldn’t know if it did, because from our perspective the sequence of causality would simply be reversed – it would travel in the other direction through the same light cone. I’m not sure he foresaw this scenario though, where a message is received outside the event horizon of its transmission. This should give aetiologists a few headaches, if confirmed.
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These from CERN results have certainly put a new twist on an already entangled debate. Hurrah for the neutrinos. Godspeed!
Clark: Angrysoba, I suppose the coroner could be citing the very passage that you linked to, in which case he would simply be using the same terminology – the title of that section is “Spontaneous Combustion” – and rather than implying anything supernatural he’d merely be classifying this case with other, similarly perplexing but apparently well-documented cases.
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Unless this is some kind of media hoax, it doesn’t seem as if the coroner is doing any of the things you suggest he is. Bernard Knight specifically refers to “spontaneous human combustion” as a myth and makes some rather obvious points about the likely origin of the ignition – he points out that most cases appear near an open hearth. It seems odd that the coroner didn’t seem to get the point and in fact seemed to think it strengthened the case for referring to it as spontaneous human combustion.
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If the journalist for the Galway City Tribune has quoted the coroner’s words to the victim’s family correctly then this is even clearer:
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“I’d say that the death was thoroughly investigated by the most experienced fire experts in the country, and I’m of the view that it fits in with spontaneous combustion, for which there is no scientific explanation,” he said.
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The pathologist comes to a more sensible conclusion: Significantly, Dr Callagy found no carbon material/soot in his trachea or a sample from his lung. “These suggest that he did not suffer from inhalation (smoke) injury and may not have been alive when the fire began,” she stated.
“The extensive nature of the burns sustained precludes determining the precise cause of death.”
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If this is the case then the cause of the fire should surely be “unknown”, not “spontaneous human combustion” which the coroner says “for which there is no scientific explanation”. Even if the coroner were using the term SHC as a stand-in term for “unknown cause” it wouldn’t mean the same thing as “no scientific explanation”. In other words, he is indeed implying “supernatural” causes.
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http://www.galwaynews.ie/21713-galway-pensioner-died-spontaneous-combustion
Writerman: I think we can assume that the measurements are accurate.
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Are you sure? It is my understanding that one of the first assumptions for very unusual experimental results is that the measurements are wrong or the equipment is faulty etc… and that the experiments need to be replicated somehow. This is what sets science – done properly – apart from religion: breakthroughs are expressed tentatively and provisionally while scientists queue up to pick holes in the data and find the errors.
The arrogance of man is unique. That our incomplete understanding of the world turns out to be shown to be incomplete is just too much for all these “experts”.
Scientific models are supposed to fit reality, not vice versa.
Time for some new theories. Newton’s model was a good fit until Einstein. Now we need the next. It is a form of successive approximation.