Paul's Posts — 13 October 2011
By Paul McGowan
Driving home a few evenings ago I heard on BBC news that physicists at Cern Switzerland were baffled after measuring a sub atomic particle traveling faster than the speed of light – something every physicist from Einstein on has guaranteed us is inviolate.
Measurement error? Perhaps, but here’s the point. Everything we believe to be guaranteed, inviolate, cannot change, is only “true” at that particular moment in time. As we learn more, things change – yes, even things that “cannot” change.
The lesson here is whatever we, as high-end industry “gurus”, believe to be the truth today should always be suspect for tomorrow.
When we limit our creative juices by believing “this is the way it must be” then we really limit our ability to create new and innovative ideas that are “out of the box”. The “box” we refer to is created by this restricted belief system.
Just keep an open mind. I think Albert might have agreed.
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Frank LaFond
Paul, I completely agree about keeping an open mind about things. I’ve certainly been close-minded about things that once I opened up to, were real game-changers for me. At the same time, I’ve seen people use this argument to completely disregard established physical principles and sell snake oil. While I can certainly imagine there are worlds of understanding beyond Einstein, I also find that good old Newtonian physics is a very accurate approximation for most purposes. The first cable manufacturer claiming a transmission speed faster than light will have to educate me on this new CERN research and how his cable was able to incorporate it. Remember the Tice clock? I could never get my brain around “coherent electrons”. It might have worked wonderfully – I never heard it. I guess I was too close-minded.
Paul McGowan
FRank, great thoughts and Lord knows there’s enough snake oil in this industry to go around. If I’ve learned anything over all these years it’s to ignore the hype, listen to the product and make my evaluation. If I like what I hear I may still ignore the reasons given why it works – because so many high-end guys try to ascribe physics to their inventions to legitimize them – when in fact they haven’t a clue why it works – and that’s a shame because many things actually do work and are ignored because the oil of the snake turns folks off. Me included.
Bazza13
As the Japanese Philosopher Shunryu Suzuki said:
“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are possibilities, in the expert’s mind, there are few. That is the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.“
Bloody Ban
I’ll gladly keep an open mind! However, in this case, the measurement was wrong afterall.
The neutrinos weren’t faster than light because we were measuring the timing from in-orbit GPS satellites. Apparently because of relativity, the timing of the neutrino trip could have been correct for satellites in space, but 60 nanoseconds off on earth.
Physics. Ugh…