![]() ![]() His reasoning is that almost invariably, these supposedly world-changing discoveries end up falling apart after further investigation, and that if it doesn't, then the discovery itself will satisfy his scientific curiosity enough to outweigh his monetary loss. Believers in the new findings would thus accuse Cueball and the scientific community of being as stubborn and oppressive as the Inquisition in Galileo's time, and even compare them to the Thought Police from George Orwell's 1984, another popular archetype of oppressive measures.Ĭueball realizes that it is more satisfying and profitable to place bets with them instead. Galileo Galilei was famously convicted of heresy for his defending the heliocentric system, and is often used as an example of revolutionary ideas being suppressed by the powerful. Prior experience has shown Cueball that in such cases, arguing with people and preaching caution is futile and will lead to "pointless arguments about Galileo". Therefore, a report that neutrinos have been found travelling faster than light challenges a fundamental law of physics and turns all of physics, or at least special relativity, on its head. Nothing can accelerate to any faster speed. The neutrinos had apparently exceeded the speed of light.Īlbert Einstein famously posited that the speed of light in a vacuum is both constant and absolutely the fastest possible speed for any object in the universe. ![]() The initial findings from the experiment were that the neutrinos arrived at the detector in less time than a beam of light would have taken. An experiment at CERN caused a stream of neutrinos to be passed from CERN in Switzerland to a receiving station at the INFN laboratories of Gran Sasso in Italy ( LNGS). The " Neutrino speed of light thing" mentioned in this comic was an actual story from the day before the comic was posted. Title text: I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake). ![]()
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