E=mc², right?

1. If you could visit anywhere in the world for a month, where would you go and why? What would you do there?

2. What’s your favorite subject in school? Why? What makes it so interesting/fun?

3. Discuss a current event. What ramifications does it have for the future? How?

Prompt Three:

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few weeks or so, you’re probably aware that researchers at CERN appear to have observed neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. If you know anything at all about physics, that shouldn’t be possible. Nothing should be able to travel faster than light. It seems like either: a) CERN had a bunch of miscalculations, b) something went wrong, or c) we broke physics.

I’m rooting for c.

On a more serious note, CERN didn’t mess up- they withheld news on this for about a month before making absolutely sure that it wasn’t human error or mechanical error. The uncertainty on the distance of 730 kilometers was only 0.2 meters- only 0.00003% of the total distance. Even with a calculated 10 nanosecond margin of error, the neutrinos traveled 730 kilometers 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. This means that it traveled 0.0025% faster than light.

Since we’ve ruled out simple computational, human, or mechanical error, some may say that they’ve just ruled Einstein wrong. This is because neutrinos have mass. In order to travel at the speed of light, an object must have no mass- that means that it has to be light. This means that FTL travel should be completely impossible for the neutrino, since it would require an infinite amount of energy to make it travel at the speed of light, let alone faster. Some people think that this is the reason Einstein was wrong; however, disproving him would pretty much throw all of our ideas on physics down the drain, so scientists aren’t so keen on tearing down Einstein just yet.

Other major scientific research facilities such as Fermilab in Chicago are attempting to replicate CERN’s experiments in order to either form more evidence disproving Einstein, or to show that CERN’s results were simply an anomaly and there was something wrong in their calculations.

Even though the evidence is tentative and nothing has been accepted as truth yet, ideas have been forming on how the neutrinos could have possibly traveled faster than light. One popular idea is that the neutrinos traveled through a microscopic wormhole- literally traveling through the fourth or fifth dimensions, where light speed may be different- in order to appear to travel at FTL speeds. This could, quite possibly, allow for FTL communications, which would revolutionize the way we think about extraterrestrial colonization and the problems associated with the time lag.

Here’s a summary for those of you who just want the important bits.

- Scientists observe neutrinos faster than light

- People think that Einstein might be wrong

- Neutrinos could have used wormholes

- The time lag in communications might be removed