The “are neutrinos faster than light” controversy continues to speed along. Last month I noted there was a major red flag in readings for the test that showed neutrinos could beat Einstein’s speed limit:
When it comes to relativity, frame of reference is everything. The satellite in this experiment was moving from West to East, tilted 55º in reference to the equator. Taken from this vantage point, the distance between the source of the neutrinos at CERN and the detector in Italy are actually changing. The excellent Physics arXiv blog at MIT’s Technology Review quotes van Elburg as saying, “From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter.”
Van Elburg says that this would throw off the experiment’s timing by 32 nanoseconds on each end of the experiment, for a total of roughly 64 nanoseconds of error in the experiment overall. This would mean that neutrino speed is quite similar to that of light, but not faster.
But this week scientists have conducted more readings accounting for this time frame reference shift and still reproduced positive results:
To account for this, the beams sent by CERN in this latest experiment were around three nanoseconds shorter, with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them, meaning the scientists at Gran Sasso would time their arrival more accurately.
“In this way, compared to the previous measurement, the neutrinos bunches are narrower and more spaced from each other,” the scientists said. “This permits to make a more accurate measure of their velocity at the price of a much lower beam intensity.”
Jacques Martino, director of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, who worked on the second experiment, said that while this test was not a full confirmation, it did remove some of the potential systematic errors that may have occurred in the first one.
“The search is not over,” he said in a statement. “There are more checks of systematics currently under discussion.”
So it seems even when correcting for the clock, neutrinos still appear to be faster than light in the latest experiment. If this continues to hold true it’s going to revolutionize physics…but there’s still a long way to go on this one.
Light-years, even. Just keep time travel technology out of Mike Huckabee’s hands. Please.
Baud
My hunch: Faster-than-light neutrinos are going the way of cold fusion.
schrodinger's cat
Has any body else confirmed these observations otherwise see comment#1
redshirt
Light speed is a strange, strange thing. Who can answer this: Why do photons hold such a privileged existence that, from one perspective, the very fabric of time and space will bend and twist in order to ensure light’s speed stays constant? Aren’t photons just another particle?
Also, as for wave/particle duality, it seems obvious that the answer is: photons are particles that create waves. Am I missing something here?
Linda Featheringill
The effort by the neutrinos to stage a revolution in physics will come to nothing unless they get better organized. They need to have a clear message and make reasonable demands. Otherwise, the MSM will get tired of them and move on to something else.
Then what? Hmm?
4tehlulz
Racism
cathyx
@redshirt: So are you saying that photons are the 1%ers of the particle world?
Baud
@redshirt: I’m a science geek but not a scientist, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Photons are privileged because they are massless, while all other particles (except the undetected gravitron) have mass. Einstein’s equations indicate that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle with mass to the speed of light, which is why nothing with mass is supposed to travel faster than light.
This is incorrect. Under quantum physics, particles and waves are not distinct things; all particles (not just photons) are simultaneously particles AND waves (in other words, they have characteristics of both).
ETA: Forgot to answer this one. The reason the speed of light is constant is that the speed of light is considered to be one of the fundamental laws of physics, and there is a theorem in physics that fundamental laws should be the same in all reference frames. In other words, no matter how fast you are moving relative to some other point in space, if you measure the speed of light, you should get the same answer as someone else who is moving at a different velocity.
schrodinger's cat
Photons have a rest mass of zero, they are bosons and follow the Bose Einstein statistics where as electrons are fermions and follow Fermi Dirac statistics.
Couple of semesters of upper level physics classes. The language of physics is math, using words makes the explanations harder and more ambiguous. If you are really interested I would suggest George Gamow’s Mr Tompkins series
geg6
As a person almost completely ignorant of these types of physics questions (and simply not willing to spend the time and effort to learn it at my age), I just want to say that the change.org ad regarding the Target holiday hours is really pissing me the fuck off. Maybe some physicists can fix it.
cathyx
I hope these experiments on neutrino speed prove to be true. We could use a boost in technology right now.
redshirt
@Baud: Gluons ain’t got no mass, but no one ever talks about Gluons.
Commentator above must be right: Particle Racism.
MattF
@redshirt: The standard answer to the wave/particle question is that a photon is what it is, the distinction between ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ is just something that our tiny, classical-physics-wired brains use to make sense of things.
The constancy of the speed of light is (still!) a foundational fact about the way things work, a photon is just a specific example– so your question about ‘what is it about photons’ is backwards. Photons illustrate and demonstrate the weirdness, the weirdness is in the nature of things.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: To understand why speed of light is invariant (it does depend on the medium, light travels slower in water than air or vaccum) google the Michelson-Morley experiment.
dmsilev
Not this again. Van Elburg’s “rebuttal” of the OPERA results was completely flawed from head to toe. The main problem with his rebuttal is that GPS timing signals are already corrected for relativistic effects, both the simple ones that he discusses and more complicated general-relativity effects. Secondly, the OPERA folks checked their clock syncs by physically driving an atomic clock from point A to B and back to A again to ensure that the clocks at A and B were cued properly.
Thirdly, even if Van Elburg was correct about a 32 ns error, the same error would be present in both clocks and that error would subtract rather than add, so he actually calculated an order (0) effect, not a 64 ns effect.
Please, for the love of God, no more about the van Elburg rebuttal.
Steve
Yawn. Time travel is yesterday’s news.
deep
I’m just waiting until they discover “Element Zero”.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
Have you seen Prof. Susskind’s video lecture series? They are awesome.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat:
There’s a group working out of Fermilab trying to repeat the experiment (Google MINOS for the details), but it will be months at the least before they can say anything sensible. Neutrinos aren’t easy to detect, so you need an awful lot of them to build up decent statistics.
Knockabout
Big long pull? Check.
Self reference to own blog? Check.
Nothing substantial in post? Check.
Called out for ignorance in comments? Check.
Boy, rookie here is really doing the B-J front pagers proud since he joined, eh?
Maybe the rest of you should reconsider your invitation to this hack. How is he better than “Bobo” or “McMegan” at this point?
Culture of Truth
Einstein, bitches!
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev:
Thanks! The media in general is mathematically and scientifically illiterate. I mean most of our punditubbies cannot even calculate something as simple as a percentage. So I take anything I see about scientific research in the news with a grain of salt.
@Baud: No, I have not. I will check it out.
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: LOL!
flukebucket
Thanks for this post Zandar. I am currently reading The Grand Design and these kinds of discussions help me immensely. All of this shit is way, way over my head but it still interests me to no end. Looks like I will be putting George Gamow’s Mr. Tompkins series on the Kindle tonight. Anything anybody else can recommend for the sure enough dumb ass who wants to learn would be appreciated. And any youtubes that might be helpful would be appreciated also. Most of the time watching is easier for me to understand than reading when it comes to this fascinating subject.
Chyron HR
@Baud:
Hey, they’re just big-boned.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
See here. I think this list is incomplete. You can also search YouTube and iTunes U for Leonard Susskind.
Roger Moore
@redshirt:
Yes. Particles and waves are not real; they’re descriptions of the behavior of large groups of these fundamental doohickeys that the universe is really made of. Asking whether a photon (or electron, etc.) is really a particle or really a wave is like asking if a water molecule is really a solid, liquid, or gas.
Mark S.
Maybe the proponents of Intelligent Design are right after all.
/Easterbrook
Villago Delenda Est
Zefram Cochrane hasn’t been born yet, so all this is quite fascinating, but it’s all premature.
The important thing will be to keep Newt Gingrich away from the time machine, he’s liable to take an AK-47 back to Robert E. Lee to tilt the War Between the States in the Koch Brothers’ favor.
David in NY
File under history or philosophy of science or something.
Is this how science usually works? A totally unexpected (or was it?) empirical finding completely at odds with current understanding, seems to invalidate the current “paradigm,” to choose a word at random?
Or is it the case that the more common sequences is a new theory precedes the empirical results, which are then found to validate it?
Maybe somewhere in between? As I understand the classic Copernican situation (which is somewhat odd because of the influence of religious, non-scientific beliefs), there was lots of data, which looked at right justified the Copernican hypothesis, but the resistance to looking at it that way was enormous. Or, for say Gregor Mendel, we thought we knew theory followed empirical research, but it now seems clear he cooked the books to fit a preconcieved theory.
I only ask because this seems unusual to me, the significance of a single empirical finding, not otherwise accounted for, or suggested by, any competing theoretical framework. (Cold fusion seems an apt comparison.) In this case, of course, the single empirical finding is of crucial significance to the theory, but perhaps that is rare. I guess my real question would be, have any other theoretical constructs been overthrown by a finding of this nature (assuming for a moment its correctness)?
Or is that question not a very good one?
Knockabout
Oh yes, and more hipster pop culture snark too. Sure am glad Zandar isn’t an ignorant douchebag spouting off at the mouth when he has no idea what he’s talking about.
What’s your response to dmsilev calling you out there, Zandar?
Besides “exeunt stage right” I mean.
Roger Moore
@deep:
It’s called neutronium, and it’s not stable on Earth. Bare neutrons (which effectively are element zero) have a half life of about 10 minutes, after which they decay into hydrogen. You can get stabilized neutronium by getting a big enough ball enough neutrons around that their gravity is enough to recapture the electrons they emit by decaying; this is called a neutron star.
Villago Delenda Est
Looks like Zandar’s got a stalker.
Welcome to BJ, Zandar!
Baud
@David in NY:
The big bang theory won out over the solid state theory of the universe as a result of the accidental discovery of cosmic background radiation.
Mark S.
Does every front pager get assigned a troll on his or her first day? Is it part of the Welcome Gift Basket?
dmsilev
It happens both ways. Neutrinos themselves, for instance, were predicted 15 or 20 years before anyone managed to detect them.
MattF
@David in NY: Well, when a physical principle makes it into a didactic couplet:
The speed of light remains the same
In every inertial reference frame.
it’s a big deal. Now, some field theorists will tell you that you just have to add an epicycle or two to the standard theory, and everything will be fine– but you’d be correct to feel uneasy about that.
dmsilev
@Knockabout:
If you have to get your jollies by stalking front page posters, do me a favor and leave me out of it please.
Seebach
If neutrinos are faster than light, what does this mean on a macro level? Robot butlers?
Judas Escargot
I don’t think there’s an issue with their clocks. Not a physicist, but I do know quite a bit (i.e. professional skillset) about time synchronization between different points, as well as the use GPS as a time source.
Given all the steps these physicists took to verify their synchronization scheme (including a long drive with an atomic clock in the back of a pickup truck), I see no problem with their clocking scheme. And 30-60ns is a long time, relatively speaking (speed of light is roughly one foot per nanosecond). So they are definitely measuring… something.
It’s a shame they can’t “move” this particle accelerator (impossible), or build another, identical one at a different latitude (expensive, impractical). It’d be interesting to modify the angle and take the same measurements to see if the time error varies or not. It would also be interesting to see if the same effect could be measured in orbit (also not going to happen anytime soon). If the Supercollider hadn’t been cancelled all those years ago, it might have been be able to repeat the experiment at the lower latitudes of Texas. Oh well.
IMO, it has to either be some effect caused by the difference in shape/rotation/density of the earth between the two latitudes; or something to do with ‘frame dragging’ (ie they’re measuring space itself, somehow).
In other words, these folks have inadvertently built an instrument that measures something. Now they need to figure out what, exactly, they’re measuring.
David in NY
@Baud:
Interesting example, but there were in that case (I’m pretty sure) two competing theories already with some reason to believe either. (I think the red-shift indicating a universe expanding outward already presaged the big bang, and was it Fred Hoyle who had long favored the big bang theory?). In this case, if the new data is right, as I understand it, there’s something really amiss with the whole Einsteinian framework, and there’s no idea what the substitute would be.
PurpleGirl
My favorite speed measurement is furlongs per fortnight.
David in NY
@MattF:
lol
@dmsilev: re neutrinos, that sort of thing I think you find regularly, as you do a finding that settles the hash of which theory (big bang, steady state) is right. This seems odd to me in being a finding that doesn’t fit in with anything and that (I gather) a couple of “epicycles” will probably not suffice to cure.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud:
I think you mean the steady state theory
David in NY
@schrodinger’s cat: I almost wrote “solid state” but caught myself. Easy to do.
Baud
@David in NY: Well, Einstein’s framework was itself a revolutionary overthrow of classical Newtonian physics. I think this would be an equally revolutionary change if the discovery is confirmed.
The closest analogue I can think of off hand is the discovery of the photoelectric effect, which is inconsistent with Maxwell’s then prevailing wave theory of light.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat:
The solid state theory has something to do with televisions without tubes, or transistor radios, or something like that.
David in NY
@Seebach:
Well, that’s a start.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat: Yes. Thanks!
Howlin Wolfe
@redshirt: Lots.
David in NY
@Baud:
Ah, sounds good (this is sort of where I trailed off in my science studies so I actually have no idea what this means). Wave theory works pretty well for lots of ordinary circumstances, so contrary data was probably upsetting.
schrodinger's cat
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, semiconductors used in TVs and most of the electronic equipment we use owes a lot to our understanding of solid state physics.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@schrodinger’s cat: Solid state has too many holes.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Sure, but it wasn’t sui generis. It was created in response to a bunch of experimental evidence (e.g. the Michelson-Morely experiments) that couldn’t be explained in terms of classical physics. If confirmed, this will be the kind of experimental discovery that eventually led Einstein to invent special relativity, not a new theory like relativity itself.
schrodinger's cat
@Comrade Scrutinizer: But does it have enough electrons?
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat:
I should have been snarkier. The “solid state” theory refers to the old South voting as a block for the most regressive candidate they can find in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s “betrayal” of Confederate values by being a decent human being.
schrodinger's cat
@Villago Delenda Est: Sorry I didn’t detect the snark, I get very earnest when discussing physics!
David in NY
@Villago Delenda Est: No, no. “Bloc voting” was anathema in the old South, because those were the code words for “N….r voting.” (You could look it up, probably.) Odd that even then, for national consumption, the latter formulation was not acceptable, and “block voting” was the acceptable euphemism.
schrodinger's cat
@David in NY:
Aahh but do Bloch waves explain everything?
Cris (without an H)
My hunch: wave-particle duality will go the way of epicycles.
David in NY
@Roger Moore:
Well, I guess that this is sort of the answer to my question — the pre-Einstein period had a number of then-inexplicable, or irreconcilable, empirical findings, and Einstein’s theories resolved some of them in a wholly new way.
And I suppose those findings were blockbusters in their own way. (I believe btw that my father, born in 1906, was taught physics in which the existence of the ether was presumed or at least discussed.)
catclub
A coupla points: 1. attaining the exact speed of light takes infinite energy for a particle with mass, and is forbidden. Contrariwise, all massless particles only move at the speed of light ( in a vacuum).
2. Going faster than the speed of light is not forbidden, but slowing down from there to the speed of light is, by the same energy argument for slower than light particles.
Not sure what it implies about mass of tachyons: negative?
3. Particle racism and favoritism: they are _light_ particles after all, not dark particles.
4. The xkcd http://xkcd.com/955/ is relevant.
catclub
Also, the coherent waves of grain xkcd was neat.
Villago Delenda Est
@David in NY:
“Bloc” has a sort of Bolshevist feel to it; “block” sounds like an outfit that does your taxes for you.
So you can see why the latter is more acceptable.
David in NY
@schrodinger’s cat: Lost me there. The only Bloch I know is Marc Bloch, the famed French historian.
@Villago Delenda Est: I get the snark — but oddly, the Southerners’ complaints about the “bloc vote” were always spelled that way, I’m pretty sure.
schrodinger's cat
@David in NY: I thought you were talking about the Bloch potential named after Felix Bloch
kindness
Higher level math is required when you want to predict the placement in time/space of particles or entities such as photons. The theoretical behavior can be told on a basic level without going over most folks heads.
Much of what is posted above does this. Whether people care to look deeper is when you need the math, so let’s not make this sound as if this is something that most people here couldn’t grasp.
It’s fascinating stuff to me.
I’m curious why a troll would even think this thread was a good place to go.
schrodinger's cat
Zandar@top
Not to be too pedantic but light years are a measure of distance not time.
David in NY
@schrodinger’s cat: I’m sensitive to the “light year = time” error myself, but I thought Zandar did not make it:
sounded like distance, not time, to me.
kindness
@schrodinger’s cat: Actually one of the questions I had had in a College Physics class I had asked us to measure something in distance as time using the speed of light as the constant. Throw the equation around and it’s doable.
schrodinger's cat
@David in NY: I read it as long time before Huckabee gets time travel technology!
PurpleGirl
@schrodinger’s cat:
Not so pedantic… “You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”
I couldn’t help myself. I can resist anything but temptation.
David in NY
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/11/quantum-mechanics-gets-even-weirder-or-maybe-less-weird
And then there’s this.
schrodinger's cat
@kindness: Of course distance and time are related if something is traveling a constant velocity, then speed=distance/time but they are not the same thing.
Light years are a unit for measuring astronomical distances. I don’t know we may be both saying the same thing just in different ways.
Catsy
@geg6:
Same here. It’s overlapping the center content column. I’ve blocked the ad but it looks like the container for it is still overlapping, and I can’t be arsed right now to dig through the source to figure out what else I need to block.
Maude
@schrodinger’s cat:
Isn’t it all theory?
I grew up around physics and never understood much, but there was the question of “outer space” being non linear.
When they first saw the braided ring of Saturn, they didn’t know what it was.
I never thought the speed of light was constant.
I think that there are far too many theories and not enough, gee, what is that. In other words, I don’t know.
Also publish or perish and competition doesn’t help physics at all.
Monte Davis
Roger Moore @ 53: The extent to which Einstein developed relativity “in response to” Michaelson-Morley and other experimental data is a complicated and still unsettled question: see here, for example. He certainly cited it often retrospectively, and it later became “the crucial experiment” in almost every exposition. But he was driven at least as much by the older clash between Galilean relativity (you observe the same physics when in uniform motion as you do at rest) and Maxwell’s electromagnetism, which implied that light and other EM phenomena would look different depending on your state of motion. The only way to have both Galileo and Maxwell is to abandon the idea that space and time are independent of motion.
One of the things that struck Einstein’s peers and set one strain of modern physics was that extremely strong faith in mathematical theory, even when it led to very strange places. Something of that is lost when Einstein is forced into an earlier “theory follows data” Baconian mode.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Reminds me of how Grace Hopper explained a nanosecond by using a length of wire.
schrodinger's cat
@Catsy: I don’t see anything,
have you tried NoScript?
Maude
@Linda Featheringill:
#$ You are the best.
Brachiator
If neutrinos are indeed faster than light, one consequence that Obama will simultaneously be the smartest guy in the room, and the smartest guy not in the room (pace, the ignorance that is Rick Perry).
trollhattan
I’m hoping this breakthrough proves true and that Apple can appropriate the technology to make my spouse’s new iphone not sound like suck.
Thank you.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
Grace Hopper handed me a nanosecond once.
Making all my serious UNIX geek friends one degree from Hopper raised my status with them immeasurably.
Bill Murray
I think faster than light neutrinos will become a new diet fad. Faster than light implies a negative mass and if you just take my new FTL neutrino supplement, all the neutrinos in your body will be replaced with negative mass neutrinos and you will lose weight. No exercise or starving yourself required.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@David in NY:
I actually took a History of Science course ages ago, and here’s my take on the process (sort of Michelson-Morley in a nutshell):
1 Experiment is set up to measure phenomena predicted by the theory.
2 Empirical data don’t fit the theory. More experiments are done, with the same unsettling results.
3 Young dude (say, Einstein) comes out of left field (say, Swiss Patent Office) with a new theory (say, Relativity) to explain all the old experiments, plus the new empirical evidence.
4 New theory is accepted after all the old dudes die off.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: Don’t want to get too close to one of those, even if you have a Puppeteer hull.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Brachiator: Is this Schroedinger’s Room? So Obama is both the smartest one in the room AND the not smartest one in the room? Until we open the door, I guess.
Svensker
@David in NY:
I thought you were talking about Bloch holes.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: I saw Admiral Hopper (then a Captain) give her speech at Keesler AFB back in 1982, had the wire & everything.
Spoke with her briefly after the talk. Wonderful lady & a credit to the Navy.
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: Handed me one too. Wish I had kept it, dammit.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Very cool. Hopper definitely one of my heroes.
Some may be familiar with her wonderful 60 Minutes interview. Here is a fun David Letterman interview.
cervantes
mass of tachyons: negative?
Actually no – imaginary.
Brachiator
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
It’s more that the new theory gets discussed, tested, verified, championed throughout the scientific community. This has been the standard for a long time. Consider the recent opening up of the Royal Society Archives.
Meanwhile, more examples of matter behaving badly:
Librarian
Neutrinos go in, neutrinos go out. You can’t explain that.
Stolen dormouse
@Villago Delenda Est:
Seems someone has read Harry Turtledove’s novel Guns of the South, except therein Beware of Spoiler!
it was Afrikaaners who get ahold of a time machine.
Scott Supak
I’m getting in late here, but Kevin Drum pointed out something that really got my interest RE physical things going faster than the speed of light:
http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-theorem-shakes-foundations-1.9392
If the wave function (which I believe is what I’ve heard referred to as “spooky action at a distance”) is an actual physical thing, then it would have to be moving WAY faster than the speed of light, as the action at distance happens instantaneously.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Julia Grey
I didn’t get an actual nanosecond from her, but Hopper was a guest lecturer at a USAF logistics course I did at Wright-Pat AFB long, long ago. I think we spent about a week of it on “computer applications for record keeping” or something. Yeah. Like I said, LONNNNNNNNG ago.
>”Exeunt stage left”
If you are referring to only ONE person, the proper term is EXIT. “Exeunt” refers to two or more performers making their exit from the stage at the same time. “Exeunt omnes,” of course, means, more or less, “everybody out.” Back when we were snotty undergrads we thought we were soooo clever when we used it in the pool. However, as we didn’t have a bear handy for pursuing the “cast,” it seldom worked expeditiously. Or at all.
>Photons have no mass at rest.
Photons rest? Who knew?
Cermet
@Scott Supak: Wow – great post/link; I have read the Bell theorem and realized what critical importance it had upon the real world and how it made so quantum so much easier to understand. Now what a stupid ass bohr was and how he got it completely wrong is being made more obvious for all to see. Glad to see his stupid ideas (that were such mostly complete shit) are being shot down.
Once I was arguing with Sir Roger Penrose (yes, I still can’t believe I ever had such a lucky chance to even see him talk, much less get to talk to him!) and I used the Bell theorem to point out a better solution to his problem with black hole issues relative to information lost/recovery – I am (hope it shows) still very proud he agreed with me … .
BruceJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
So long as they’re in the right place, everything works.
StarStorm
Dude, Huckabee’s still around? I thought he, you know, rotted away.
Jason
@redshirtLight speed is a strange, strange thing. Who can answer this: Why do photons hold such a privileged existence that, from one perspective, the very fabric of time and space will bend and twist in order to ensure light’s speed stays constant? Aren’t photons just another particle?
The answer is, there’s actually nothing privileged about photons, or indeed the speed of light in a vacuum. We are actually talking about “c”, which is a fundamental constant which regulates the speed of propogation of all kinds of fields, not just photonic fields.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=478783:
FAQ: Is the c in relativity the speed of light?
Not really. The modern way of looking at this is that c is the maximum speed of cause and effect. Einstein originally worked out special relativity from a set of postulates that assumed a constant speed of light, but from a modern point of view that isn’t the most logical foundation, because light is just one particular classical field — it just happened to be the only classical field theory that was known at the time. For derivations of the Lorentz transformation that don’t take a constant c as a postulate, see, e.g., Morin or Rindler.
One way of seeing that it’s not fundamentally right to think of relativity’s c as the speed of light is that we don’t even know for sure that light travels at c. We used to think that neutrinos traveled at c, but then we found out that they had nonvanishing rest masses, so they must travel at less than c. The same could happen with the photon; see Lakes (1998).
Morin, Introduction to Classical Mechanics, Cambridge, 1st ed., 2008
Rindler, Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological, 1979, p. 51
R.S. Lakes, “Experimental limits on the photon mass and cosmic magnetic vector potential”, Physical Review Letters 80 (1998) 1826, http://silver.neep.wisc.edu/~lakes/mu.html
Sure, but how does that work? the classic
double slit experiment is where you’ll want to begin your reading. You’ll need to explain single-photon self-intereference, for a start.
mclaren
Still bullshit. Check the paper. The neutrino detector has a 25 nanosecond jitter. The difference in arrival time is only 20 nanseconds.