is that scientists need to calm down and be more humble when bringing their favourite theories into society,

Amen.

A bit late to chime in on this one but we were told at school quite emphatically that the speed of light was constant. Not a few weeks later they showed us light going through a prism being divided into the colours of the spectrum. How? Each colour travels at a different speed.

Duhh! Never trusted physics since.

Matthew

Andrew Bevan wrote:

Handn wrote:Reality hasn't changed, only (silly?) scientific theories are being dropped, as they always are eventually.

The only thing that has changed is our consciousness.

Yes, it's just development. Before, Copernicus there was the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system. Copernicus' system still needed epycycles until Kepler discovered that planets move in elliptic orbits rather than circular. Halley discovered that Jupiter and Saturn deviated from Keplerian orbits. Newton worked this out into a theory about gravitation by mass. In the late 17th century R?mer discovered that light's speed wasn't infinite. Newtonian physics didn't always seem to be correct until Einstein explained ed it by his theories.

It's not that the former theories were ridiculous but that newer theories either replaced the former or explained the former in a more profound way. Kepler's laws can be explained or be written as Newtonian laws.

As science develops, it isn't impossible that one day Einstein's theories may not apply all the times. Perhaps it takes a time before the scientific world accepts it, just as it took time to accept the heliocentric model and later Einsteins theories, but if the results continue to be similar then it will be accepted.

A problem with physical phenomena which aren't understood is that sometimes astrologers immediately use it to explain astrology. Although this isn't wrong, many of them (including me) hardly understand the physics behind it yet adopt it too easily under the premise: - It's unknown how this new phenomenon works, - It's unknown how astrology works , - Therefore, this new phenomenon explains how astrology works.

However, with the necessary caution, it's always very interesting to speculate about how astrology works, just as it is interesting to speculate how telepathy works (of which we have no explanation either).

According to Aftenposten, who quotes the New Scientist, the light covered the test distance of 730 km in 2,5 milliseconds, while the neutrinos arrives 67 nanoseconds earlier. Now I am not used to working with such minute figures but there would appear to be a difference of 0.00268% If this is correct it would mean that if considering the light from a start 76 light years away, the neutrinos would arrive 74days 9hrs and 24minutes earlier?

Andrew Bevan wrote:Now I am not used to working with such minute figures but there would appear to be a difference of 0.00268% If this is correct it would mean that if considering the light from a start 76 light years away, the neutrinos would arrive 74days 9hrs and 24minutes earlier?

This problem baffles the scientists too, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... speed.html

"If neutrinos were that much faster than light, they would have arrived [from the supernova] five years sooner, which is crazy," says Sher. "They didn't. The supernova contradicts this [new finding] by huge factors."

Well, if you look at the above figures there is something interesting about the fact that the neutrinos gain about 1 day a year, or something that could be converted into 0? 58', which of course equals the average daily motion of the Sun.

Please double-check my maths.

Please double-check my maths.

Unless the error is mine, I'm afraid you omitted the % factor. 1/0.00268%=
1/0.0000268=37313.43283582089552. With the 76 lightyears distance I got 0.74392531296 days. With the supernova example I got 4.5 years (click the link 'supernova' in the article I mentioned, in which it is mentioned that the supernova in the LMC was at 168,000 light years.)

Since I have no calculator with me, this online calculator is a very handy one: http://web2.0calc.com/

Thank you, Eddie. That would seem a plausible mistake!
Yet from a neutrino perspective there would still be a 1/100 ratio.

Andrew Bevan wrote:Yet from a neutrino perspective there would still be a 1/100 ratio.

Apart from the neutrino's speed it's also interesting to think about correction for the , aberration of light , although it's a totally different subject than this thread's. Usually in ephemerides the apparent position is used but when the aberration of light is left out. The planetary positions are slightly displaced, resulting in a position in where the bodies actually are and not where we see their (reflection of) light. The difference is small though. The only difference it would cause is the rounding off up or down to the nearest arcminute. But worth pondering on.