Faster than Light! (not)

Scientific truth is really growing, but it is by fits and starts;  hypotheses rise and fall;  it is difficult to anticipate  which will keep their ground, and what the state of knowledge will be  from year to year.  In this condition of things, it has seemed to me to be very undignified for a Catholic to commit himself to the work of chasing what might be phantoms …

-- John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864)

An update to a post about the continued attempts of the media to puff up particle physics with more philosophical-theological content  than it can well bear.

The latest from today's Washington Post:

Nev-vah mind...

[originally posted 24 Sept 2011]
The Washington Post front-pages CERN’s report of neutrinos apparently traveling faster than light.   The prominent coverage is welcome, reminding us that particle physicists are still hard at work, even if they have had a mostly discouraging couple of decades of late, and been outshone by stellar developments in cosmology.  The coverage is somewhat breathless (“Particles Bust Einstein’s Speed Limit”) and reliably middle-brow -- scientists are depicted, not as exercising their brains, but as scratching their “noggins”, just like you ‘n’ me.   But the article doesn’t fall to the level  of  “physics porn” -- wrenching the facts around and blotting out context, to appeal to the laziest readers.   It’s an honorable heads-up.  Would that a quarter of every front-page could be devoted to physics!   (And another quarter to math, and another to biology, and another to philosophy… For the latest prevarications by politicians, please turn to page 48b.)

Not entirely accurate, perhaps.  The report may not be the very first -- there were some experiments at Princeton awhile back, that seemed to indicate travel either supraluminal or backwards in time.   More important, the reported particles presumably do not actually “bust” the speed of light, in the sense of accelerating until they surpassed it:  that really would contradict Special Relativity.   Rather, they would exist beyond it, in the supraluminal realm:  and are as impotent to slow down to or below the photon’s lazy speed, as an ordinary subluminal particle is to speed up to it.  The possibility of supraluminal particles (“tachyons”) was first mooted many decades ago, though it led nowhere, as they apparently did not exist.

It they do exist, that is now surprising -- but it seems surprising (speaking naively now),  not simply that the supraluminal realm should be populated, but that, if it is so, that it should be so sparsely populated.    How have such particles eluded detection until now?  And why not supraluminal photons -- or protons, for that matter?  The situation is somewhat reminiscent (again, speaking naively) of the tremendous factual, though not theoretical, asymmetry between matter and antimatter, as we find it in our neighborhood.

In both cases -- supraluminal particles and antimatter -- the discovery of the new stuff is  thought-provoking, though systemically a bit awkward.  It certainly doesn’t match the hype in the concluding line of the WaPo’s (scientifically semi-literate -- hey, at least the glass is half full) blogpost on this subject: “it will shake the very foundation of what we believe;”  nor, in the words of the Top Comment at that site, does it tell us “something fundamental about us”.  Bear in mind that scarcely a wight upon this planet harbors justified true belief about much of anything in science;  we just acknowledge (if we even well recall) what we read in the papers.  So to be told that there’s a Higgs boson, say, or then, Nope, none after all; that the cosmos is infinite no finite no it’s flat no it’s curved;  doesn’t shake our foundations one tittle.   Would that it did.

[Update 19 Nov 2011:]

Les neutrinos toujours plus rapides que la lumière
A reader comments:
"Vu l'obscurantisme qui recouvre peu à peu la France depuis 4 ans... comment s'étonner que les lumières veuillent fuir notre pays..."

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Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

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Wanna know how I spent sophomore year? 

Listening to this:

The Best Way to Travel

(“ Fas-ter -  than - light -- if you want to…”)

I was taking Advanced Calculus (from Andrew Gleason -- “Math 55”, the pons asinorum; I fell off), Topology (from Edwin Moise) and Intro Logic (Phil 140, from Quine), each of them key.   That song played in the background, or the foreground, over and over, the sound-track to a complete immersion in abstraction.  Giant posters of Einstein, and of the astronauts, beamed from the walls of my dorm-room.  And the Moody Blues mooned on…

It’s actually pretty insipid, musically;  but then, it is difficult to make art out of physics.
Moreover there is a danger, whether in listening to such things, or (its visual equivalent) simply lying on your back and staring up at a cloudless sky, a danger of winding up in a gravely dangerous state, incisively limned here.

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For all you really need to know about tachyons, click here.

[Update 16 III 2012] Never mind again:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/not-so-fast-second-experiment-refutes-faster-than-light-particles/2012/03/16/gIQAqYLkGS_print.html

[Update 1 Oct 2013]

Thus, so far as we know to this day, there are no supraluminal particles.

There are, however, supraluminal animals:  the snow bunnies.