Friday 23 September 2011

antitelephone

There's quite a bit of discussion about the rather rigourous and consistently unexpected measurements that physicists at the CERN laboratories have chanced upon and disclosed as an invitation for peer-review. Neutrinos from Switzerland are arriving in a partner research facility in Italy a bit earlier than expected, just a bit faster than the speed of light, which is a cherished constant and supposed impossibility. I think no one is suggesting that Albert Einstein's century old theories of special relativity and derived equations are wrong, but such discoveries are exciting and disabusing, even when debunked and remediated. I do wonder how the neutrinos' arrival was clocked in the first place, though I am certain that the scientists are desperate themselves to be proven wrong. CERN is a particle accelerator and when one is coaxing particles within fractions of the speed of light, the energy required approaches infinity and mass, inertia that resists going faster builds and builds. Nothing in Einstein's work, however, precludes the existence of particles that always move at the speed of light or even faster, just so longer as they were not accelerated and cannot convey energy or information. Rather than strictly quantifying an exact relationship between matter and energy, Einstein's work is a framework that reveals logical profundities that are reflected and confirmed in our understanding of the fabric of the universe. That physical objects, as predicted by Einstein and others, undergo a time-dilation as they increase speed has already been proven: subatomic particles boosted to near light speed, in a sense, survive much longer and travel further than their limited half-life at rest proffers. By extension, anything traveling faster than light, would appear to a stationary observer to be moving backwards in time. The neutrinos could arrive in Italy before they were dispatched from Switzerland, but such a result seems to violate common-sense, causality and everything else. If, as in the contemporary thought experiment, one's future self could call and influence the decisions of one's past self, everything seems to come apart and go all out of sequence--unless that is what already is happening and we cannot see it for our own logical blinders.