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Ignobel Awards, Crab Nebula Calling, LUCO, Icarus Plans, Fins To Feet, Cometary Origins, Pee To Fuel, Happy Hate, Placebo Receptor, And Much More…
Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer!
There are more wrong answers to questions than there are correct ones.
On the surface this may seem obvious, but if you drill down a bit you soon discover that it is not only obvious, but also plain to see…
That the wrong information is prevalent in absolutely every human endeavor for the unknown itself begins as everything everywhere and only ends in an infinite number of best guesses.
It is utterly unavoidable that we must constantly make decisions based on incorrect data derived from poorly constructed questions under less than ideal experimental conditions with insufficient history of past results upon which to base future predictions…
And yet… our margin of error ridden decision making has allowed us humans to survive, to multiply and to produce magnificent achievements of the mind, terrific triumphs of technology and irrefutable rationalizations of the physical realities of time and space…
And while some will tell you that the old solutions are still the best solutions to our way forward…
Others, unsatisfied with simply having it right some of the time, continue to pursue more perfect solutions.
Are occupying themselves with the possibilities that were either overlooked or entirely unforeseen…
and are challenging the best answers of the past in order to find better ones for the future.
For no matter how much ground has been gained from the unknown in the many millennia of human knowledge we must not rest upon the laurels of giants…
And remind ourselves that the pioneering spirit of mankind still has an unexplored frontier ahead…
For there are still more wrong answers to questions than there are correct ones.
Although there is one thing we do know with great certainty… that it is time for
This week in science… coming up next
Ignobel Awards!!!
Crab Nebula News
First common organelle
Flying Closer to the Sun
Fins to legs
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Water from Comets?
Bacteria turns urine into rocket fuel
Happy people more likely to hate
Some placebos act via cannabinoid receptors
Hey ladies! Make-up makes people like you better.
Brain variation determines memory accuracy.
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1_SAUL_ this is my twitter name,would you read my tweets and let me know if you would like to write on them or someone who would
Crab Nebula News
http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.3797
Flying Closer to the Sun
Maybe I can clear up the confusion here.
The story in the show notes refers to a mission called Solar Orbiter.
The quote you read on air is from an IO9 article.
It refers to a different mission, called Solar Probe Plus.
The “orbiter” will maintain a long-term stable orbit about the Sun.
The “probe” will gradually shrink its orbit around the Sun.
Expanding Universe
If neutrinos travel faster than light, we should be able to detect, from the supernovas out there, neutrino arrivals, right?
Right. The strongest limits on the speed of such supernova neutrinos come from SN1987a.
This event remains unique because supernovae are rare events, on a galactic distance and human time scale.
Neutrino signatures from sources beyond the Local Group are too faint to detect.
There was a search at IceCube to detect neutrinos accompanying a flare up of the Crab Nebula.
I haven’t read the whole paper, but it doesn’t look like the signal was strong enough to detect.
They should be showing up ahead of the light, which we’ve already seen.
To be clear, superluminal measures have been seen at OPERA and MINOS, but no other sources.
The SN1987a detection shows NO such superluminal velocity. So, something’s up with that!
Reconciling these data is challenging, ongoing work.
We’ve got neutrinos coming in from at least a few [supernova] examples.
No, sadly, just the one.
What I’d like to see, is a correlation between how quickly they show up and how far away that object is.
You can see the velocity limits of neutrinos from various sources in the following figures:
Figure 5 http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.4980v1.pdf
Figure 1 http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.5682v1.pdf
I want to see if it’s consistent with the expanding universe and light being red-shifted to Earth.
Any neutrino velocity is consistent with the accelerating expansion of the universe.
No neutrino velocity will change our interpretation of the redshift in Hubble’s law.
You may consider neutrinos velocities of half c, twice c, whatever you like!
None will avoid the evidence for the accelerated expansion of the universe.
If light has just that tiny bit of mass…
Well, for one thing, Coulomb’s Law would be violated!
Photons have zero rest mass, end of story.
[The Hubble constant] is such an amazingly tiny number that I’m really upset that we don’t allow for light to slow down…
I’m sorry this upsets you, but it’s how nature works.
Light can be split, using a prism, into a rainbow spectra that has dark lines in it.
These lines are like a fingerprint left by the light-emitting atoms.
Hubble noticed these lines shift towards the red with increased distance of the source.
This effect is small for short distances, as you say, but the cumulative result on light from distant objects is very large!
This LARGE effect demands an explanation, and no explanation has survived scrutiny save those which include an expanding universe.
[Neutrinos] could be like a new measuring stick!
No, they could not.
Neutrinos do not have Spectral lines.
Without spectral lines, there is no way to distinguish between distant and local sources of neutrinos.
I recorded a video of my neutrino rap lyrics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmIQxdmISjw