I think that they might want us to discuss the subject as you say because if we make a faux pas, better we step down than the head of CERN.
So politics being what it is, you need to get all the facts and suppositions out in the open for all to see and then as they do their thing, they will
be cautious to preserve their high esteem within the community.
(They are a huge employer of physicists and they do really help to keep people graduating into the field and to give graduates a chance at a
career)
And essentially to really understand where we are in terms of progress in physics you need to use a simpler model than the standard model because so
much work has gone into the field and it becomes difficult to keep up with all the discoveries and what they mean.
So the standard model then becomes the warehouse, where the knowledge is stored, and if you walked into a warehouse, and went over there to a group of
boxes, and you examined their contents that group of boxes would have things in it that are related and you could say well that is an order for a
certain type of shop.
But take 3 different groups of boxes together and all of a sudden, that unit seems to have no coherence.
You will sort it out though if you get enough information and time. So then take the whole warehouse.
And lets suppose its not an electric engineering supply warehouse, lets suppose it has everything under the sun in it. It only makes sense as a
broadly defined universe of stuff. We don't have the unifying principal down yet that might categorize it all and make it all organized.
Now then you could walk into that warehouse, have a lot of things on your mind and not be able to remember where the light switch is. Tripping over
boxes, trying to remember what you were saying, and then say something off the top of your head, like "We measured it the second time, and it wasn't
faster than light"
As one of his colleagues said to the press. So,
are they doing this on purpose? Stepping in it on purpose for publicity? Well they are smart
people and the second is backing up the first, as a good colleague, and covering for him and saying it was just experimental error. The real error
having just been explained elsewhere which was that they were thinking Cherenkov radiation travels faster than light, that is why it is blue
shifted.
This is a mine field. Why is it blueshifted? Shorter wave length higher frequency. So the error was merely speed of light in a vacuum vs speed of
light in water or Chlorine. Anyway its witty if you know what I am talking about the fact that the second colleague tried to fix it by sacrificing
himself as well. So why are they doing all that? Well they are excited about the news and want to share it with others. The news that they can send
and receive neutrinos when for the longest time they were just trying to detect them.
And the ramifications are fantastic, that you could x-ray the earth, or, wait for it, the moon.
www.realclearscience.com...
edit on 3-4-2012 by Rocketman7 because: (no reason given)