Love it. Another triumph of the scientific method. Which does so much better at revealing the secrets of reality than religions do.
An experiment to repeat a test of the speed of subatomic particles known as neutrinos has found that they do not travel faster than light.
Results announced in September suggested that neutrinos can exceed light speed, but were met with scepticism as that would upend Einstein's theory of relativity.
A test run by a different group at the same laboratory has now clocked them travelling at precisely light speed.
Now, this doesn't conclusively settle the question of whether it is possible for something to travel faster than the speed of light. Science never is settled. It always is open to fresh findings, new revelations, deeper insights.
But since last month bad wiring was considered to be a likely reason for the anomalous light-speed-shattering observation, and now Einstein has been proven right, the Theory of Relativity (which says nothing can surpass the speed of light) is on firm ground again.
This will disappoint those, like conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who hoped that a discovery of faster than light neutrinos would undermine confidence in other firmly held tenets of modern science -- like human caused global warming.
Krauthammer doesn't understand how the scientific method operates. Recently I heard a noted climatologist talk about how scientific knowledge is like a gigantic partially completed jigsaw puzzle.
Finding out that one piece of the puzzle has been incorrectly placed doesn't mean the rest of the picture put together by science is incorrect. It just means that what was previously considered to be a reliable bit of knowledge now has to be removed and replaced by a blank spot, a scientific question mark.
This is why I said that even if neutrinos had been proven to travel faster than light (which they haven't, given the most recent experiment), the Theory of Relativity would still be valid.
It just would need to be recognized as having exceptions in certain circumstances, just as Newton's laws of motion remained valid after Einstein came up with his explanation of how time and space behave in circumstances far removed from everyday human experience.
What's so admirable about the scientific method is how truth is valued as the highest goal.
A team called Opera made the initial finding that neutrinos appeared to go faster than the speed of light. If this claim had held up, the Opera scientists would have been credited with a marvelous scientific discovery.
Yet here's how a member of the Opera team reacted to the latest experiment:
Doubts about the Opera results were heightened last month when researchers said they had found a flaw in the technical setup that could have distorted the experiment’s figures.
Antonio Ereditato, a member of the Opera team and the head of the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics, said he welcomed the latest results.
“These results are in line with our recent findings about the possible misfunctioning of some of the components of our experimental setup,” he said.
Asked whether he was disappointed, he said: “This is the way science goes. What matters is the global progress of scientific knowledge.”
Yes. Kudos to Dr. Ereditano.
He recognizes that the overall jigsaw puzzle of knowledge is what's important, not getting pats on the scientific back (even a Nobel prize) for having expanded the bounds of the completed picture of reality.
Imagine if a religious believer had made a corresponding spiritual "discovery." Well, I don't have to imagine it, because on this blog true-believing commenters frequently talk about their supposed discoveries of higher realms of reality.
They don't demonstrate the humility and openness of scientists. When questioned whether their supposed knowledge might be wrong, usually they say "I know what I've experienced."
Well, the Opera team also knew what they experienced: evidence of faster than light neutrinos. But they realized that experiments can be faulty; observations can be unreliable; what seems to be true may be erroneous.
I'll end with some quotes from Richard Dawkins' "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True."
And atoms are far far smaller than bacteria. The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye -- and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all!
In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out.
They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or nuclear fusion, or electricity, or anaesthetics.
In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things?
I'd be mighty skeptical of equating the validity of einstein's theory of relativity as compared with the theory of manmade global warming.
I think there is a good grounds for believing the theory of manmade global warming is probably true, but its not precise, not even close, and its not even clear if its just the earth's natural warming and cooling cycles, which is still not properly understood itself.
Science is a useful tool, but you have to be very weary of using it too justify personal beliefs. The whole point of science is that it should be an objective enquiry and its theories need to be put in the proper context, rather than simply saying a theory is scientific and therefore true. Many scientific theories once held to be true have subsequently found to be false.
Posted by: George | March 17, 2012 at 05:25 PM
Yes, we've seen many false claims like inertia-less drives and cold fusion not pan out, as distinct of course from religious claims which always come true for everyone.
Let's see, how many religions were able to compute the speed of light, identify the elementary particles of matter or describe their interactions?
Posted by: Jim Jones | March 17, 2012 at 07:15 PM
I agree with this article and have to add that if neutrinos did travel faster than light they would have been in the same closet as the unification of gravity and the other forces waiting for someone to bring a new light.
About this new light that is shocking did you hear Verlinde's view on gravity. He basically says the reason why we could not match gravity with electricity etc is because Einstein was wrong. So was Newton with his force on a distance. He has a new theory that results in the laws of Newton and Einstein while having total new assumptions and yes it is simple!
These assumption arose from his studies on black holes. They had to make some weird assumptions there because entropy seems to be going the wrong direction. The universe became ordered in a black hole and that could not be right. From all that he took order of an unknown reality as basic quantity and derived gravitation from it that is just a process of nature going to less order as always.
It means the big bang is not there because gravity is not like Einstein figured it out. Dark matter is something different if at all present I'm not sure. It opens a view on physics in which particles no longer need to be points or string entities. They can be anything all we need to know about them is the entropy and other information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?_r=2
It is new to me so my explanation sucks (only saw it a couple of days ago). If it is right and a lot of physicist tend that way than it will shake a hundred years of physics much more than the neutrino did.
Posted by: nietzsche | March 18, 2012 at 03:45 AM
well for example we've also seen einstein theory of relativity ridiculed by the scientific establishment for many years until it became irrefutable.
The history of science is replete with such trends where the biggest discoveries in science are often at first the one's that are most ridiculed and belittled, including the theory of evolution itself.
cold fusion is not totally without basis and much science fiction becomes science, but a perpetual-motion machine does seem to be againt the laws of the universe as we presently understand them. nevertheless provided the objective evidence is there, it becomes science, this is the meaning.
But my point is not that science is to be equated with religious claims in that it is equally as limited, it is exactly the opposite, merely that any claim to knowledge (including supposedly scientific ones) should be based on the evidence that develops in support of them.
Science is therefore the best objective indication of truth that exists. But there are different branches of science, as well as emperical, statistical or mathematically supported scientific theories, all imo can be said to have different levels of objective truth. The theories most likely to have the most truth are those supported by all forms of evidence.
Religious claims are merely subjective claims, thus rank as the lowes level of objective truth on the same rung as a work of fiction.
Einstein;s theory(s) of relativity are virtually uncontestable, and for decades now ppl have been trying, whereas while the manmade theory of global warming does appear to be correct it is nowhere close to the level of scientific proof that is associated with either of einsteins relativity theories.
Posted by: George | March 18, 2012 at 03:54 PM
Reality is not good enough for human beings - never was, and never will be. Science is just a method of attempting to control our situation as best we can. The news is not good: the universe began, and the universe will end. Every last jot and tittle, to borrow a biblical phrase.
Science will never succeed in making Reality palatable for the masses.
Now that we have tamed the wild neutrino, it is time to get back to the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson.
Posted by: Willie R | March 18, 2012 at 06:20 PM