Now this goes without a doubt that the article I am discussing in this post was written as an April fools day joke, and yes if you read the article its very easy to see that both from their sources to the math. However, I am not writing this post so much for a steemit audience (as those on steemit that read this will likely have the basic knowledge required to fact check) and instead am writing this so that I can comment a link to said post on those who share this on facebook believing it... How do I know they believe it? because many of them push anti-science articles and have pushed multiple articles stating that the speed of light is not a cosmic speed limit, per say.
So before we go further, the article in question is here. Now, I am going to show why it is absolutely stupid to state that this article has any validity and I will do so with 5 main arguments. Now these arguments are going to be used on the lines of "If this were a real breakthrough..."
Argument 1: Why would they put relativistic speeds in terms of kilometers per second? Meters per second gives them a higher degree of accuracy.
Okay, so the apparent speeds that they clocked these neutrinos at was 300,006 km/s and the speed of light being 299,792.458 km/s (299,792,458 m/s). However, when you are looking at speeds really close to that of the speed of light, you want precision in your answer. Now it could be that the author decided to convert the version with precision to a version without but even so what purpose does this serve?
Alright, argument 1 is a little weak but the next arguments are going to get better.
Why would the author of a post commenting on a groundbreaking discovery not have the ability to convert kilometers to miles accurately? If this were real then why could they not use the Google converter?
I am not joking, a quote directly from the article: "from CERN towards Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away"
So here is a screenshot from the Google unit converter that shows that 730 kilometers is ~453 miles, not 500. 500 miles is closer to around 804 km. People that assume that the article is real are actually implying a level of incompetence amongst the writing staff of a 'reputable' source of information.
Okay, okay, this is still flimsy as to my main point which is its preposterous that people could believe this is real. Like so far all this could be chalked up to bad writing staff. So lets continue.
Argument 3: They imply that someone at CERN who wrote these papers do not understand how to use a distance-time-velocity formula.
They say that the neutrinos had traveled 730 km in 60 nanoseconds (6.010-8 seconds) but was traveling at speeds of 300006 km/s. Using our lovely distance-time-velocity formula we find that it actually took the neutrinos (according to the speed they gave) ~2.4 milliseconds (2.410-3 seconds). Milliseconds and nanoseconds are very very different.
But maybe this is on the authors for saying it took 60 nano seconds instead of saying that the neutrinos were 60 nanoseconds faster.
Argument 4: Assuming they messed up and meant 60 nanoseconds faster, the math still doesn't check out.
Lets use a distance of 730 Km (as that would be the distance which would be used by the actual scientific body) and not convert the speed of light to meters. Now they said that the speed of the neutrinos was 60 nanoseconds (6.0*10-8 seconds) and that it took light 2.4 milliseconds (2.4x10-3 seconds) so lets do some back of the envelope calculations shall we. Those 2 numbers are so far apart that So lets produce some equations.
This is a distance-time-velocity equation set up to calculate time. Now since the neutrinos completed their journey faster we will find the difference in time by taking the time taken for light to get there and subtracting the time taken for the neutrinos to get there.
Now, I don't know if most people can tell but 1.73322e-6 is not equal to 6.0e-8, I mean maybe you could chalk it up to them having a different way to calculate distance that is more accurate however by changing the formula to calculate the distance at which there would be a 60ns difference in arrival times it is a lot closer to 2.5 km then it is 730 km.
Now this being said, it assumes that velocity-time equations are still the correct way to calculate this at relativistic speeds which I believe it still holds (@lemouth you can correct me if I am wrong here) but even if it doesn't, there is a big discrepancy between 60 nanoseconds and 1.7 microseconds.
Argument 5: The sources
Here are the sources for this article: here. Nuff said?
Look I am sure I could have come up with way more reasons why this post is obviously fake, because its pretty obvious. However when pages and people start sharing it as fact (and thanks to a little thing on facebook, there is actually a setting that will tell you how long the article should take to read and how long a person read it before sharing it) without reading it it becomes disconcerting. Now if anyone knows my presence on steemit they know that like to debunk stuff from pyramid schemes to scams and into science we have me debunking claims about glyphasate and a 5 part series onvaccines... and that doesn't even cover all of it. My favorite quote became "In for a penny, in for a pound" this year because, well, I put some effort into something so why stop?
Now if you do not know, this entire post seems to be a jab at a claim made a few years back where a loose fiber optic cable created a delay in their timing system that caused the data to appear as if it were showing faster than light travel. Source of one such article discussing this back in 2012. That doesn't change why I posted this though which is that so many people hold distrust in science and really distrust in all of STEM, and that I think is a little saddening. I mean, yes studies can be faked (at the risk of never getting published again) and the peer review system as it sits isn't exactly working as predicted for a number of reasons, however that doesn't mean that science as a whole is wrong... Just that the system is flawed. Another problem is as science gets more and more complex it gets harder to explain it in simple terms and as such requires more background knowledge to describe such phenomena. Originally I was going to create a giant list of authors that I find really take this issue and provide solutions... What I mean is a group of steemit authors that that write content in such a way that it is covering complex subjects but does so in ways that are easy to comprehend and fun to read, but I wasn't sure if all of them would appreciate there name being advertised in connection to such a post and for that reason if I were to advertise people it would be in a way that is more... well.. done so in a way that the post is about advertising amazing content creators and not about debunking an April fools joke.
Anyways, if you like reading STEM type stuff, definitely check out @steemstem.
References:
Kinematics equations: Wikipedia
April Fools Article: Chaosmos News
Distances, time, velocity, etc... All of these are not so well defined concepts in special relativity. v = d/t still olds, but is not invariant when one changes the reference frame.
Fun fact, I had an office in Strasbourg in 2012 with Opera researchers being in the next office... The 2012 year was epic! :D
That is what I suspected when I was looking at the wikipedia page of special relativity in the kinematics section however I didn't know for certain.
As for being in the next office, that must have been a really interesting time.
Funny time is a better word, especially after the un-observation :)
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