time travel, parallel universes, and other useful illusions
Produced by MIT Game Lab, A Slower Speed of Light is an open-source “game prototype” that takes players on a (very) short tour of the relativistic nature of light. It’s more a demonstration than a game, though. Players are tasked with collecting floating spheres, and for each sphere they collect, the speed of light slows …
So here’s a patent application for a “tubular shaped interstellar space craft,” filed on November 14, 2008. It’s an ambitious patent, outlining a “plasma based aircraft” that can “approach the speed of light,” and it’s packed full of gadgets: “The craft has a proton accelerator, plasma guns, diversion devices…This invention is comparable to the discovery of …
Continue reading “Strange Patents: An “Interstellar Space Craft””
I suppose I should write something about the outcome of that whole faster-than-light neutrino situation, given that I’ve written so much about them already. But I’ll make this one quick. On Friday, scientists at CERN announced the results of their latest neutrino speed test, called the Icarus experiment. The final answer? Neutrinos do not travel …
Continue reading “Neutrinos! Stop, In The Name Of The…Laws Of Physics!”
They could have changed the world as we knew it. Overturned one hundred years of accepted physics. Shattered one of the fundamental pillars of our understanding of the universe. Instead, it may have all come down to “bad wiring.”
Scientists have developed a “new imaging solution” that operates at a rate of one trillion frames per second, effectively allowing them to capture the propagation of light particles. What you see in the video is a short “burst of laser light” beaming through a [Coke] bottle.
Neutrinos just don’t seem to be cooperating with our cosmological constant. Back in September, physicists working on the OPERA project fired neutrinos from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, to Gran Sasso Italy. Afterwords, they discovered the neutrinos had arrived 60 seconds before light would have, a finding that could, if true, greatly undermine our current physics …
Continue reading “Latest faster-than-light neutrinos test yields same results”
There was a lot of excitement when research coming out of CERN suggested neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. The news was, of course, met with a lot of quirked eyebrows; you don’t just overthrow one of the greatest pillars of physics with a cloud of neutrinos and a difference of 64 …