Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Special Relativity May Answer Faster-than-Light Neutrino Mystery
I'm skeptical that this paper offers a simple refutation of the apparently superluminal observations by CERN/OPERA. The relativistic factors associated with the GPS system have been well-known and understood since the system was designed. In fact, the system would not work if Special Relativity hadn't been taken into account when the system was designed. That's right--relativistic effects would produce gross navigational errors if the GPS system didn't compensate for them. Though I agree that the OPERA paper did not explain the timing system very well, I'll reserve judgment until I see what they have to say.
I have no idea if this comment is correct but it would seem that whoever designed the GPS would take relativistic factors into account. I wonder if anyone is trying to duplicate the experiment. Have not seen much in the news lately.
2 comments:
This is what one of the comments said:
I'm skeptical that this paper offers a simple refutation of the apparently superluminal observations by CERN/OPERA. The relativistic factors associated with the GPS system have been well-known and understood since the system was designed. In fact, the system would not work if Special Relativity hadn't been taken into account when the system was designed. That's right--relativistic effects would produce gross navigational errors if the GPS system didn't compensate for them. Though I agree that the OPERA paper did not explain the timing system very well, I'll reserve judgment until I see what they have to say.
I have no idea if this comment is correct but it would seem that whoever designed the GPS would take relativistic factors into account. I wonder if anyone is trying to duplicate the experiment. Have not seen much in the news lately.
I know that GPS does (and has to) take relativistic effects into account. My understanding of the paper is that OPERA's use of GPS didn't.
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