The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #140745   Message #3235795
Posted By: Musket
08-Oct-11 - 10:45 AM
Thread Name: BS: Can somebody explain in plain English
Subject: RE: BS: Can somebody explain in plain English
Space / time is a ration and time slows with displacement.

So all the neutrino excitement has proved, (and to be fair the implications are rather fundamental,) is that the constant that other properties are measured against, (formally the speed of photons in a vacuum) now has to be altered to the maximum speed we can get neutrinos to travel, and again, I suspect that although the experiments weren't in a vacuum, a vacuum must allow a higher speed anyway.) We may find other particles that have an even higher velocity in the future and then the constant will alter again.

However, relativity demands that everything is relative, hence the speed of light was used as the constant because we assumed it was the only constant. It still is a constant, and can still be used, but something else has a higher displacement and so in an ideal world, we should now assume that as the constant. (The 3rd string on my banjo is always half a tone flat within 3 secs of tuning it. That is the only other ruddy constant I know of.)

Fascinating, but as the constant is used purely as something that is not relative, it doesn't matter what it is really. E=MC2 still holds, just the value of C changes, so the ratio of E to M remains the same. After all, C is just an arbitrary value that has no bearing on the value of either mass nor energy.

Scientists ponder on what happens if you do go beyond the speed of light, but bear in mind this is not "you" and all your corresponding atoms, this is a particular subatomic particle that alone does not become a building block into a physical object. The excitement is, when you boil it down, about now wondering what else can go that fast, and if something does, can it begin to explain the mass of the universe we calculate as existing but cannot detect?

Time is only measured against the speed of light, it is not a property of it...

That's about as far as I go. When I wrote my PhD thesis, quantum mechanics was about to get an explosion of understanding, but luckily for thickos like me, it wasn't altering every week!