[meteorite-list] ebay restriction on international auctions of meteorites? and faster than the speed of light neutrinos!

From: JoshuaTreeMuseum <joshuatreemuseum_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:29:17 -0400
Message-ID: <D5539193A16141969E4C570549F022D3_at_ET>

Meg is taking over as head honcho of Hewlett-Packard. I just was notified
by eBay today that as of October 1st no more mention of emails will be
allowed. They don't want any off eBay transactions taking place.

Also, this is pretty cool:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos?newsfeed=true

Faster than light particles found, claim scientists
Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat
forbidden by Einstein's theory of special relativity

  a..
    a.. b.. c.. reddit this
  b.. Comments (80)
  a.. Ian Sample, science correspondent
  b.. guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 September 2011 18.32 EDT
  c.. Article history

Neutrinos, like the ones above, have been detected travelling faster than
light, say particle physicists. Photograph: Dan Mccoy /Corbis
It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the
universe and the concept of time - nothing can travel faster than the speed
of light.

But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world's largest
physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded
particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein's
theory of special relativity.

Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that
raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time,
blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the
fundamental principle of cause and effect.

They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern - the European
particle physics laboratory - timed to coincide with the publication of a
research paper describing the experiment.

Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking
Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic
particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the
Earth to the Gran Sasso lab.

The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after
running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000
neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran
Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or
minus 10 billionths of a second.

The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of
light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is
299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at
299,798,454 metres per second.

The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with
its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding
until other laboratories confirmed the result.

Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the
Guardian: "We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never
a discovery until other people confirm it.

"When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that
there are no nasty things going on you didn't think of. We spent months and
months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors.

"If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial
things we are clever enough to rule out."

The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the
result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with
their own experiments.

Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: "If this
is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something
nobody was expecting.

"The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding
of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before
effect.

"Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our
construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are
buggered."

The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 "bricks" of
photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The detector
weighs a total of 1300 tonnes.

Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato's
team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the
measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong.

Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being a
fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or less than
one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team's result is six standard
deviations.

Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result was
so radical. "Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be
much more prudent," he said.

Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light processes
at Indiana University, said that while physicists would await confirmation
of the result, it was none the less exciting.

"It's such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without others
replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this," he told the
Guardian.

One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted that
neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by interacting with an
unknown field that lurks in the vacuum.

"With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the
limiting speed in nature is the speed of light," he said. "It might actually
be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly."

Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no electric
charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was not there.

Kostelecky said that if the result was verified - a big if - it might pave
the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a
puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century.

"If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the
structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to constructing
such a unified theory," Kostelecky said.

Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another
theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut
through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra
dimensions. "That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the
speed of light when it hasn't," he said.

But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield
University, said: "Neutrino experimental results are not historically all
that reliable, so the words 'don't hold your breath' do spring to mind when
you hear very counter-intuitive results like this."

Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago in the
US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS experiment saw hints
of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light in 2007 but has yet to
confirm them.



=======================

Phil Whitmer





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Hi Yinan,

I didn't realize she came in that early in the game.

So who do we blame? LOL

Best regards,

MikeG
Received on Thu 22 Sep 2011 08:29:17 PM PDT