Monday, October 10, 2011

CERN

CERN, Einstein, neutrino, Science, Israel,   : Dry Bones cartoon.
You probably blinked and missed two news items recently out of CERN.

The first item was that physicists at CERN had reported that they had observed neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light!! CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland and the speed of light is the fastest that anything can move, according to Einstein's theories.

That first CERN news item was discussed in a piece in the Chicago Tribune headlined "Was Einstein wrong?"

"...a cornerstone of Einsteinian theory is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, about 186,000 miles a second.

If that is wrong, and something can outstrip light speed, then 100-plus years of physics — everything from the subatomic to theories of how the universe evolved — suddenly is up for revision. The universe doesn't work the way we thought it did. We don't really know what we thought we knew.

"It would be amazing, everyone would be jumping up and down like crazy," Cal Tech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll told us. "It would certainly be the most surprising discovery in the last 100 years." -more

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The second CERN news item that week was the news that the CERN project had officially made Israel the fifth associate member of the project, joining the United States, Russia, India, and Japan. According to the Jerusalem Post:
"Israel last week officially became a formal associate member of the Center of European Nuclear Research (CERN) particle accelerator project, lending the country significant prestige in the global academic and research community...

...Israel was named one of five countries recognized unanimously as “being worthy” of joining the project. CERN has even ordered parts from Israeli industry and sent experts to visit on a regular basis. It took two years for the final invitation to be received. Israel’s high level of theoretical and practical know-how – much greater than Israel’s proportionate size – was greatly appreciated at CERN and is responsible for Israel’s path toward recognition as a official member..." -more

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