It isn’t fair

View 694 Monday, September 26, 2011

The possibility that CERN has discovered a faster than light neutrino has reached the mainstream press. “Has a Speeding Neutrino Really Overturned Einstein” but I note that even the mainstream physicists don’t seem to understand the situation. The Wall Street Journal found CCNY Professor Micio Kaku to say

The CERN announcement was electrifying. Some physicists burst out with glee, because it meant that the door was opening to new physics (and more Nobel Prizes). New, daring theories would need to be proposed to explain this result. Others broke out in a cold sweat, realizing that the entire foundation of modern physics might have to be revised. Every textbook would have to be rewritten, every experiment recalibrated.

Cosmology, the very way we think of space, would be forever altered. The distance to the stars and galaxies and the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) would be thrown in doubt. Even the expanding universe theory, the Big Bang theory, and black holes would have to be re-examined.

Moreover, everything we think we understand about nuclear physics would need to be reassessed. Every school kid knows Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2, where a small amount of mass M can create a vast amount of energy E, because the speed of light C squared is such a huge number. But if C is off, it means that all nuclear physics has to be recalibrated. Nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and radioactive dating would be affected because all nuclear reactions are based on Einstein’s relation between matter and energy.

Which is part truth and part nonsense. Nuclear weapons will continue to work without regard to the truth of relativity, and in fact neither Einstein nor relativity had anything to do with the development of nuclear weapons. Szilard and Wigner thought an atom bomb was possible and that it would be vital for the US to get it before Hitler and Mussolini did. They wrote a letter to President Roosevelt saying so, but they couldn’t get Fermi to sign it, so they approached Einstein. Eventually Teller drove Szilard out to Einstein’s summer cabin, Einstein rewrite the letter and dictated it in German, it got translated into English, Einstein signed it, and it went to Roosevelt. Just how much influence that had over the President is controversial, but one certainty is that the Manhattan Project didn’t use the theory of relativity in the design of the bomb.

[I will note that Lise Meitner and her nephew Fritsch used the equivalence equation and published experimental data to conclude that nuclear fission, including a chain reaction, might be possible. This was just after her dramatic escape from Germany where she had been a Professor of Physics until all the Jews were dismissed. In 1938 she escaped to Holland and then Sweden, and in a famous walk in the snow they concluded that a fission reaction was possible.) So far as I know Dr. Meitner never questioned relativity. She also refused to work on a bomb.]

As to how much of physics is affected by the possible overthrow of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, that remains to be seen: as I have noted elsewhere (see Mail https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=2241 including the material added after first posting) there are non-Einsteinian theories that claim to explain all the experimental observations that drove Einstein to come up with his Special and General theories of Relativity. They mostly do so by correcting Newton’s assumption that gravity propagates at an infinite velocity (and that the speed of light is indistinguishable from infinite).

And that is probably that until there are new observations confirming or falsifying the FTL neutrinos. The 60 nanosecond discrepancy (sixty feet at the speed of light) is large enough to measure with some accuracy, and as I understand it the neutrino beam can be turned on and off faster than that, meaning that at least simple bits of information can be transmitted using these speedy neutrinos. If we ever get information at faster than light, Einstein Relativity is indeed gone, and we will need to look for a new theory to explain our observations.

Exciting, isn’t it?

At the moment the key issue in the 2012 election seems to be “fairness”. The problem is that it’s easier to agree that the tax rates are unfair than it is to agree to raise taxes so that the government can continue its 7% exponential rate of growth.

I understand the reality of No New Taxes, and Taxed Enough Already. I would be willing to agree to an increase in taxes in exchange for two spending adjustments: first, all budgets, everywhere, across the board, are cut by 1%, and by but I do not mean that they merely receive 6% increase as the present budgeting system counts a 1% cut. I mean a 1% cut in that 99% or less money is paid out next year than was spent this year, and that applies to everything. I understand that a 1% drop income would be very hard on some on fixed incomes and retirements, and that might need adjustment, but the adjustments would have to be compensated by other cuts (such as bunny inspectors?). Understand that under present rules this would be seen as a crippling 8% cut in all kinds of programs like food stamps and Medicare and everything else.

Second, the absolute size of the Federal budget gets cut another 5% over the next ten years, and never grows larger than it is now. This will be seen as a terrible cut in the budget and intolerable.

Given those provisions I might agree to an increase in taxes based on “fairness”; but the whole exercise would have to be done carefully, with the full understanding that without risky investments there won’t be economic growth, and taxing successful investors is one heck of a bad incentive for making risky investments.

Be prepared though: every non-Obama candidate is going to be pummeled on the “fairness” issue.

I note that the Senate has passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open another couple of months. That is, as I understand it, the equivalent of a freeze, which is at least a step in the right direction. It contains no “stimulus”.

The local iconoclast talk show notes that President Obama is in Los Angeles and doing a fund raiswer at the House of Blues. Some are now calling that the House of Bribes.