The speed of light is NOT constant

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My trouble was with DF96's last sentence in his post #474. Scientists are wrong more often than it seems to imply. Granted I may be misunderstanding, because I agree entirely otherwise. I do prefer using "scientists" because IMO saying science sometimes gets things wrong is like saying literature sometimes misspells words. CERN was wrong to not be thorough enough and allow flaky connections into their experiment. Newton wasn't wrong to write the Principia instead of the General and Special Theories.
Moving ahead, journalists do keep looking for headlines. It should be added that scientists are often all too happy to oblige.
I adhere to a position of "It's not the poison. It's the dose."
 
So they tightened the connector and got back the 60nS they were missing. Now if they tighten it a bit more, they can probably score an extra 20nS.

What's the standard "scientific" procedure in this case? Fiddle with the connector till you get the expected results, then put a drop of glue on it so no-one can mess with it again, and call your results good?

"Einstein proved right again!" - Daily Trash.

Hey, what would you do? Disagree with Einstein and you lose your funding. Better make those results fit the theory, boy!
 
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Hey, what would you do? Disagree with Einstein and you lose your funding. Better make those results fit the theory, boy!

I suspect many scientists would like neutrinos to travel faster than light, just as in the documentary that Cloudwalker referred to above, many of the CERN team wanted the Higgs to be ruled out. It stirs things up and makes research and theory much more fun.
 
Scientists make mistakes. Science (the whole enterprise) makes fewer, because of peer review and open discussion. That is why I said 'science'. The neutrino results, whatever the outcome, are an excellent example of science at work. Much of the reporting of this is an excellent example of journalists' ignorance of how science works.

The experiment was carried out partly at CERN, not by CERN. The experiment uses techniques and precision which exceed what many people would even consider possible. Just establishing a common timebase over such a distance is an amazing feat of engineering. It is often forgotten that to do this frontier-level science you also have to routinely and reliably do frontier-level engineering. Our arguments about audio look trivial by comparison.
 
Consider this..........
Light normaly travels in a staight line.
However, if gravity can "bend" light, can it also slow light down under the right conditions?

Hi, My understanding is that its not the light that gets bent by gravity, its the space that the light moves through that gets bent, the light travels in a strait line though this bent space

As for gravitational forces slowing light down, no, gravity will slow time down (Gravitational time dilation) but, light still travels at the same speed, what changes is the frequency of the light
 
We have evolved to eat cooked food because it makes for more efficient digestion of energy producing material and of other nutrients. That's why roasted and smoked meat tastes good.

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How "bad" it might be for you probably depends on processing and cooking temperatures..... WAG

Ha! The USA has marvelous resources including the USDA and all those wonderful aggie u's. Here you go Wavebourne:

Nitrite in Meat
 
Joe, Gravity bends space, gravity does not bend light rays. It looks like light travels in a curve, but really light is still travelling in a straight line.
Gravity doesn't really slow light down... better way to think about it is that Gravity slows time down. Large gravitational field = slower time than if you were in a small gravitational field. An extreme case; a black hole; in a sense time ceases to exist beyond the even horizon (from our point of view) so we never see anything really go across an event horizon, it just gets more and more red shifted. Whilst from the photons point of view it really does cross the even horizon travelling at the speed of light. So signals beyond the even horizon are out of causal contact with us.

Gravitational red shift is a consequence of this time dilation. Whilst the red shift is what we see, we must take into account the conditions of the observer, once you do this, the real cause is that time dilation takes place when changing gravitational potential, this changes the wavelength of the light.
 
This is also my (non-physicist) understanding. Light follows the geodesic. Red shifts are the consequence of the light from moving objects relative to the observer not changing velocity.

Nope. Speed of light is constant C. In glass (or other materials) the light is getting absorbed and emission again and again by particles that caused the time gap - refraction - however speed of light in between of particles is C.

In case you affect energy of light (gravity field for example) it does not affect the speed of light but change the wave length of light instead (color shift).

less energy - longer wavelength (red shift)
more energy - shorter wave (blue shift)

Speed of gravity is infinity fast that was by sir Isaac Newton. No one have proved the opposite yet.

Albert Einstein assumption speed of gravity is equal to C. No one have proved it yet.
 
Report yesterday on the neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. They found a bad connection in a fiber cable on the GPS link slowing the clock. When corrected, the neutrinos traveled at.... ta-da... the speed of light. The world of classical physics is still safe.
 
I think what you're getting at SY is sound waves, but I didn't quite understand how you were saying it. For light rays there are various ways to get red shifts, time dilation, space expansion... erm, any more guys?

Say the sun instantly disappeared, we would only notice this visually ~7 mins later. As for when we would be killed by the resulting change in momentum... who's to say, but I think the consensus is that it would happen at the same time as we noticed it visually disappearing. This is consistent with the prediction that gravity waves travel at the speed of light. Some models of inflation assume that space expanded at the speed C in the early universe... but others say that space can expand much faster than C.. someone more knowledgeable on inflation may need to chip in on that one.
 
Ha! The USA has marvelous resources including the USDA and all those wonderful aggie u's. Here you go Wavebourne:

Nitrite in Meat

Here you go, scientists VS reporters:

It has been reported that people normally consume more nitrates from their vegetable intake than from the cured meat products they eat. Spinach, beets, radishes, celery, and cabbages are among the vegetables that generally contain very high concentrations of nitrates (J. Food Sci., 52:1632). The nitrate content of vegetables is affected by maturity, soil conditions, fertilizer, variety, etc. It has been estimated that 10 percent of the human exposure to nitrite in the digestive tract comes from cured meats and 90 percent comes from vegetables and other sources. Nitrates can be reduced to nitrites by certain microorganisms present in foods and in the gastrointestinal tract. This has resulted in nitrite toxicity in infants fed vegetables with a high nitrate level. No evidence currently exists implicating nitrite itself as a carcinogen.

To obtain 22 milligrams of sodium nitrite per kilogram of body weight (a lethal dose), a 154-pound adult would have to consume, at once, 18.57 pounds of cured meat product containing 200 ppm sodium nitrite (because nitrite is rapidly converted to nitric oxide during the curing process, the 18.57 pound figure should be tripled at least). Even if a person could eat that amount of cured meat, salt, not nitrite, probably would be the toxic factor.
 
tvrgeek, i'm not surprised... if we really did discover faster than light travel, i suspect it would be a little more impressive than a tiny tiny tiny minuscule fraction faster! the world of classical physics was always safe though - there are ways it could have been worked around and fitted in alongside what we have already if it was shown to be a true phenomena. I wouldn't be hugely surprised if there are particles of some sort that could exceed c. Why should we assume we can see everything that goes on in the universe?
 
Now if we can only explain spooky action at a distance. ( Quantum entanglement) I don't like the current explanation. Nature tends not to be that complicated.

The Doppler effect ( red shift) is immensely powerful. So powerful it can make county police cars slow to the speed limit when passing school zone camera speed traps.
 
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