Kill Your Grandpa

View 693 Friday, September 23, 2011

The big news is that CERN has a pretty good case for faster than light travel by a neutrino. (BBC) No one wants to believe it. It is a fundamental assumption in modern physics that the speed of light as the absolute limiting velocity in the universe, and most physicists think this is some kind of anomaly, a measurement error perhaps. Nothing can move faster than light. That’s an axiom, because if something can go faster than light then the whole notion of causation is gone, and woe!

Yet the evidence seems fairly solid. Neutrinos sent from Switzerland to a lab in Italy about 450 miles away arrived some 60 nanoseconds earlier than they ought to arrive. That doesn’t sound like much, but in fact it’s huge: as Commodore Grace Hopper was fond of saying, a nanosecond is about a foot. Put two detectors fifty feet apart and see what happens.

If this holds up, something is wrong with relativity. Einstein got it wrong.

Of course some have always asserted that there is something wrong with Einstein’s theory. One was Petr Beckmann in his book Einstein Plus Two http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/texts/beckmann_einstein-dissident-physics-material.pdf . The book is tough reading for those who have got out of practice using calculus and physics, but the arguments can be followed by anyone. Beckmann shows that many of the anomalies such as the movement of the perihelion of Mercury can be predicted by classical Newtonian physics if you assume that gravity propagates at the speed of light, rather than instantaneously as Newton assumed; and indeed this was done well before Einstein’s famous paper on the subject. I don’t suppose there are more than a few hundred physicists in all the world who take Beckmann’s theory seriously, but there are some including some smart cookies.

And, of course, there’s all the speculation about tachyons. I won’t try to reproduce the theories; Wikipedia has more information than most of us want. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon In particular you will be interested in the assumptions about causality. Do note that the causality paradox assumes the truth of Einstein’s relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon#Causality

Beckmann said in the preface to his book:

I am not so naive as to think that the first attempt to move the entire Einstein theory en bloc onto classical ground will turn out to be perfectly correct. What I do hope is that the approach will provide a stimulus for the return of physics from description to comprehension. Attempting to redefine the ultimate foundation pillars of physics, space and time, from what they have been understood to mean through the ages is to move the entire building from its well-established and clearly visible foundations into a domain of unreal acrobatics where the observer becomes more important than the nature he is supposed to observe, where space and time become toys in abstract mathematical formalisms, and where, to quote a recent paper on modem approaches to gravitation theory, "the distinctions between future and past become blurred.

The principle of the absolute limit of the speed of light is so well accepted that most science fiction authors admit that their space operas with faster than light ships is more fantasy than science fiction, which is supposed to be fiction about what might be, as opposed to pure imagination. It is unlikely but somewhat exciting to discover that space opera is science fiction again.

Time Science puts it this way

a team of European scientists has reportedly clocked a flock of subatomic particles called neutrinos moving at just a shade over the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, that can’t be, since light, which cruises along at about 186,000 miles per second (299,000 km/sec.), is the only thing that can go that fast.

If the Europeans are right, Einstein was not just wrong but almost clueless. The implications could be huge. Particles that move faster than light are essentially moving backwards in time, which could make the phrase cause and effect obsolete.

"Think of it as being shot before the trigger is pulled," wrote University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank on his NPR blog. Or, as Czech physicist Lubos Motl put it on his blog, "You could kill your grandfather before he had his first sex with your grandmother, thus rendering your own existence needed for the homicide inconsistent with the result of the homicide."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2094665,00.html#ixzz1Yo8VjI4k

Of course that assumes rather a lot about the universe and the truth of relativity. Assume I have a means for sending messages from Alpha Centauri much faster than the speed of light: I have an Alderson Drive. An event observable from Earth happens there, say a comet crashes into a planet. After it happens but before the light reaches Earth, a faster than light message gets out and the starship Enterprise is dispatched to arrive at Alpha Centauri in time to prevent the crash. This makes for a paradox – but only if you assume that there is no absolute time in the universe, and all events occur relative to each other, and every inertial frame of reference is equally valid. In the common sense world, the Enterprise can’t get there in time to prevent the comet impact. It has already happened. You can’t go back and kill your grandfather just because you can get to Mars in an instant. But that’s just common sense, and we already know from the two slit experiment that common sense doesn’t always make everything comprehensible.

On the other hand, suppose there isn’t anyone to observe Schroedinger’s cat: does it never die?

Common sense assumes that time exists, and there is a clock in the universe: events happen or they don’t , time’s arrow doesn’t let you go back and change things. You can’t go back and kill your grandfather, and the speed of light is no more relevant than the speed of the pony express as compared to the railroad as opposed to the telegraph. The telegraph didn’t let us go back in time just because it could transfer information faster than the pony express did. Common sense says that if something travels faster than light it won’t give you time travel. But, as I’ve said, when you get to quantum effects we’ve got cases of repeatable and reliable effects that common sense can’t make any sense of …

Enough. Thinking about this stuff can give you a headache.

HPV vaccine

Lot of argument back and forth about the HPV vaccine. Assuming it’s safe (the CDC says so), I don’t see what the problem is. Sure, parents don’t want their young girls to have sex. I’ve got two daughters and I don’t want them around sex until, say, 50. So what. Protecting them from dangerous or difficult to treat contagious conditions seems like a reasonable thing for the public good.

Phil

Sure. Fine. Get them the shots. But why should I pay for it or require you to do it?

Whatever the answer to that. it’s surely not part of the powers granted in the Constitution of 1787. For states, maybe so. The states have always had the power to take measures in the realm of public health. The question is whether this particular STD imposes a sufficient danger as to require compulsory vaccination against it. Who shall make that decision?

And assuming that it’s decided that compulsory HPV vaccination is a good idea, assume the state is broke (most of them are): is this such a benefit that we ought to raise taxes or borrow money to do it?  All are valid considerations, of course. Just because a state has the power to do something, and determines it would be a good idea, doesn’t mean that it can be afforded or should be.

 

The Green Jobs are the hope of the economy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44638883/ns/politics-capitol_hill/t/solyndra-leaders-invoke-th-amendment-hearing/ 

Solyndra bet that Silicon would stay at a high price. The company was dead from the first day. So far, so good; but then came the federal money to bail them out.