CERN Set To Rupture Dimensions And Unleash Demons? Total Balderdash!

One of the demons people fear is likely to be released if CERN's Large Hadron Collider Is back  up and running.

What is it about basic physics experiments, i.e. into the basic nature of the universe, that drive an element of humanity into total paranoia and hysteria? Now that CERN is ready to commence experiments once more with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) it's been noted that wacky, halfwit speculations are circulating the memosphere like a virtual brain virus (WSJ, April 5, p. A1 and A10).

One nutty blogger actually tried to pin last year's deadly Nepal earthquake on LHC trial tests, while a headline of an opinion piece published by the Coldwater MI 'Daily Reporter' screamed: "We Should Be Very Careful About CERN!". Why?  Because you don't understand its working principles?

Meanwhile, as the WSJ piece put it (A10):

"Last summer, Internet chatter about CERN's role in hastening Doomsday spiked"

Showing again that too many without adequate knowledge have way too much time on their hands.

Acknowledging the frenzy, CERN's cognoscenti put up a FAQ on its website called "The Surreal FAQ" and in its one of many deadpan rejoinders to the nonsense assured one and all "it won't open a door to another dimension" also adding: "Shiva, a gift from the Indian government represents the life force and we have lots of statues. Our logo is meant to represent particle accelerators, not Satan"

Sadly even having to acknowledge no obeisance to an entity ("Satan") that doesn't exist anyway.

Then there are the dime store psychologists, never mind they lack even a dime store exposure to psychology. The WSJ piece cites a Michael Barkun - an emeritus professor of Political Science at Syracuse University who offered the chestnut that "CERN has a special ability to attract the conspiracy subculture".

But as I noted in my post from two days ago it was Dr. Pat Bannister in the 1970s who distinguished a conspiracy (sub-) culture from the genuine conspiracy research community. And the yokels proposing CERN's LHC opening up "doors to other dimensions"  and unleashing "demons" are definitely of the first category. They are basically adult children who lack a grasp of even basic physical concepts and hence concoct whole cloth nutso nonsense that some - like Barkun - generously describe as "conspiracies".  A better word for them is unsupported, unverifiable bullshit.

According to Barkun quoted in the WSJ (ibid.):

"Any time you have forces that are high energy and invisible, like those in the Large Hadron Collider, they lend themselves to these kind of interpretations"

Which is debatable. It is rather more plausible that such off the wall interpretations will come from those with a minimal science background, or even reading background. Which are exactly the points made by those such as Neil Postman and Pat Bannister. If you think and operate at a cartoon level, and your reading is at a comic book, superstition or cartoon level,  eschewing anything "difficult",  you will emerge as a child. Then you will entertain childish ideation.

This is the specific case of the Raelians also cited in the WSJ piece.  According to the article: "They see life on Earth as the creation of scientists from another planet, and announced last year they would stage a demonstration at CERN's campus to protest the LHC's destruction of tiny life forms contained within particles"

No, you just can't make this shit up. These dopes truly believe subatomic particles like quarks harbor miniature life forms. As one CERN spokesperson put it: "I guess they more or less see particles as planets with very small people on them:"

Clearly the Raelians ignore the fact these life forms would have far more to worry about being gobbled by ordinary dust mites. Fortunately, they must have come to their senses as they never showed up.

Some of the blame I think might be placed on CERN for willingly participating in fantasy fiction fare that weak minds might find believable. For example, CERN chose to participate in the 2009 film 'Angels and Demons' which spun a yarn about using antimatter created in the LHC to construct a super bomb. In fact, CERN's physicists contributed to the script! Bad idea, because even a loose association like that would trigger neurons in the collective brains of a paranoid child subculture that grew up with video games and X-men comics. Then they might conjecture such fictional participation was concealing a real one.

Kate Kahle, who oversees social media for CERN (and has a physics degree), was quoted in the WSJ piece admitting she "tried to engage directly with serial conspiracy theorists with mixed results." She recalled one of the responses to her denial of occult mischief: "Was that a 'no' to the portal or to the demons?"

Of course, Pat Bannister would have advised  Kahle  from the outset not to waste her time because none of the occult lot she addressed were at the level of  mentally mature adults. That is,  who could grasp her words within a rational setting as opposed to an irrational one embraced as more real by semi-literates, unread in even classic fare like 'Beowulf' or The Odyssey'.  (Far less factual scientific books like Hawking's 'Brief History of Time',  or Peter Sturrock's 'The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence', (It would be like arguing with a kindergartner whether the 2nd derivative can be used to obtain the maximum of a function.)

Again, the conspiracy culture approaches its conspiracy thinking - if that is what it can be called - from a cartoon level of simple analogies and caricatures: i.e. good vs. evil, '666' means antichrist,  high energy machines imply dimensional ruptures etc. No genuine research or investigations of any scientific or mathematical validity go into it. Bannister herself would point out the very mention of "demons" immediately discloses the person as possessing the mental age of a 5 or 6 year old.  Hence, no serious person would treat such a "conspiracy" as the rational product of a sound or mature mind.

Kahle's error lay in making that assumption (of dealing with rational minds) as opposed to overgrown babies who combine an extravagant imagination with a sense of profound entitlement to have their codswallop respected. Much like too many in Google groups who believe just because they can express an absurd opinion on the Kennedy assassination they can expect it to be accepted.(Or they base their opinions on a work of fraudulent scholarship like the Warren Report.)

In the end, CERN's high energy experiments will be performed and no untoward effects - like mini black holes or cosmic ruptures- will be manifested. At that stage one hopes the regressed infants and their ideation will settle down, and perhaps muster enough curiosity to read a real science book, as opposed to a comic.

Is Stephen Hawking Serious About the 'God Particle' Destroying the Universe?

One thing we can say about Stephen Hawking: He's never at a loss to come up with a new way to scare the bejeezus out of complacent humans. Just three years ago he warned of an invasion of advanced aliens that would likely imitate the arrival of the European conquistadors who decimated native peoples in the New World in the 15th-16th centuries. Only this time modern humans would occupy the place of those technologically unsophisticated groups and become fodder for the aliens. It got many people to start thinking that we may have to worry a bit more when we send powerful signals into space - either intentionally or unintentionally.


Most recently, Prof. Hawking has warned that the Higgs boson — or so-called God particle — has the potential to destroy the universe, as reported by the Sunday Times .  This seems even more terrifying than the alien threat because the latter was localized for our own species and corner of the cosmos- as opposed to snuffing the whole 'enchilada'. But when one reads between the lines one quickly realizes Hawking is stretching the bounds of practical scientific prowess and feasibility.

The putative basis of his warning is actually highlighted in more detail in the foreword to the book Starmus, 50 Years of Man in Space.   Therein, the theoretical physicist wrote that if accelerated to high energy levels, the Higgs boson could cause space and time to collapse — and we’d be caught unawares. From the preface:

“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV). This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.”

However, Hawking is gracious (and sympathetic of human feelings) enough to go on to aver he does not believe that this event will happen in the near future. Gee, thanks a heap, Stevie! But I'd have guessed it anyway given the magnitude of the energy needed from an accelerator (100b GeV) to make that happen. (Let us also bear in mind that the energy scale driving vacuum inflation was last seen just after the Big Bang- whereby the initial cosmos expanded from the size of an atom (about 1 fm in diameter) to several times the radius of the solar system.)

Anyway, Hawking explains for our benefit:

 “A particle accelerator that reaches 100 billion  GeV would be larger than Earth and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”

Hmmmmmm........"larger than the Earth"...... or more than 8,000 miles long! Yeppers, I believe that would take roughly all the money that's ever been spent on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems - or about 14 trillion dollars (at minimum). So, I don't believe there's anything to fret over, since the energy demands of our population are actually increasing as the reserves are diminishing. (Frackers want you to believe they have the exception but this is mere 'snake oil' to use the parlance of Richard Heinberg)

In point of fact, such energy mastery would be more typical of the Type I Civilization once proposed by Russian cosmologist I.S. Kardashev. By his definition such a civilization would be able to wield and develop energy scales equal to an entire planet's output. (By his reckoning Earth wasn't even at Type 0.1).

(The Higgs boson was theorized by Dr. Peter Higgs in 1964. In 2012, evidence of Higgs boson was discovered by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. )

All of this interjects the question of what Hawking's next scare is likely to be: a possible collision with a mini-black hole (or one created in the CERN machine?) Or, Earth being blasted by the intense radiation of a gamma burst supernova? I am sure Vegas books will soon be taking bets!

'God Particle' Theorists Get Nobel Prize in Physics - But Pieces of Higgs Puzzle May Still Be Missing

The announcement yesterday of the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics created quite a media storm. Half a century after he formulated the theory that would change the world, Peter Higgs,  84, of Edinborough University, shared the 8 million Swedish kronor (£775,000) prize with François Englert at the Free University of Brussels.

The pair received the prize for showing how fundamental particles get their masses. Before the theory, the answer to this basic question was unknown After all, they had postulated the existence of the "God Particle" - otherwise known as the Higgs boson. It can be thought as the "glue" which holds particles of mass together.


In the parlance of The Royal Swedish Academy, the prize was awarded  for "the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the Atlas and CMS experiments at Cern's Large Hadron Collider."

What is the background here? It basically began when the two theorists produced a series of papers in 1964 that described how an invisible field that lurks in the vacuum of space interacts with elementary particles and gives some of them mass.  Now, this was still before Arno Penzias and  Robert Wilson's detection of the 2.7 K isotropic radiation subsequently traced to the "Big Bang". And hence, before the cohering process that resulted in what's been called the Standard Model.

Elaborating a bit: this so-called 'Standard Model' is generally defined as the symmetry:

SU(3) x SU(2) X U(1)

where each of the above denotes a specific matrix, or more exactly a group. See, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/04/looking-at-groups.html

In the case of SU(2) we describe it as the "special unitary group" which has the form:

S =

(a.........-b*)
(b..........a*)

where a*, b* are complex conjugates and we have (aa* + b*b) = 1. Thus the elements of SU(2) are the unitary 2 x 2 matrices with DET (determinant) = 1. These groups thus define the behavior of a specific class of subatomic particles. Spontaneous symmetry breaking would therefore resolve this combination into constituent parts, e.g.: SU(3) associated with the 'color force' of quarks:

 SU(2) x U(1)

associated with the electro-weak force.

One possible symmetry breaking (quark -boson format) is:

SU(3) x SU(2) X U(1) -> SU(3) + SU(2) x U(1)

which would occur at a particular ambient temperature (T_qb) for the universe at some epoch (E_qb) in the past. In the foregoing, the synthesis of SU(2) and U(1) into the locally gauge invariant electro-weak theory requires a mechanism which confers mass to three vector bosons while leaving the photon massless. This 'mass-giving' mechanism is called the Higgs Field or Higgs mechanism, and it demands the existence of one or more massive, spin-0 bosons otherwise called Higgs bosons.

Last year, theory evidently transmuted into reality when the discovery (thanks to the large hadron collider)  was announced at CERN. As I noted (in a July 4 blog post), Dr. Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, while referring to the new discovery as "a historic milestone"  nevertheless cautioned that it was too soon to know for sure if the new particle (coming in at 125 billion electron volts) is actually the long sought particle. (Also, was it a unique Higgs, or just one of several?)

The problem? The culmination of analyses of over 800 trillion proton-proton collisions over the 2 years leading up to the announcement generated a quandary. When buttonholed,  the physicists admitted they  actually knew little. The CERN results were mostly based on measurements of two or three of the dozen different ways, or “channels,” by which a Higgs boson could be produced and then decay. Worse, there were hints that some of the channels were overproducing the Higgs while others might have been underproducing. In either case, false positives or false negatives, one had to look askance at the initial results.

The upshot? There may not have been a real Higgs discovered but a spurious 'mirage' imitating some of its properties but more a confection of the data than based in reality. Also, assuming a genuine signal or find, it may not have been unique but only ONE of two or three different Higgs bosons. Much like the case of the neutrino, which was once believed to be one entity only, but we now know is THREE: the electron neutrino, the tau neutrino and the muon neutrino, see e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/solving-neutrino-puzzleand-matter.html


By March 15 of this year the issue appeared settled, to the extent that at least that ONE Higgs had indeed been  found,  when CERN's brain trust stopped dithering and announced that the particle described in July 2012 was, in fact, a Higgs Boson. Spokesman Joe Incandela said in a statement issued March 15 :

“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,”

 To make this final determination, the dataset was analyzed to see if the quantum properties of the boson discovered in July matched the properties that are currently predicted by physics. After tests in two different detectors, it was confirmed that the particle possessed those properties

Ben Allanach, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, said:

"This is the recognition of a triumph for fundamental physics that will stay in the history books for millennia to come. I am thrilled about the prize, and Englert and Higgs both deserve it well. I cannot over-stress the importance of the discovery. The mass mechanism that the Higgs boson is a signal for has had a huge impact on particle physics over the last 50 years. I think many of us felt that it had to be correct, although we were willing to let data dissuade us."

Maybe. But it would still be nice to finally also settle the issue of whether the putative discovery is unique, or if other Higgs bosons may be lurking in the vacuum. To that end further experiments using an upgraded Large Hadron Collider may be called for. Unfortunately,  the LHC is  currently closed down for repairs. But the team is working on making it faster and more powerful. By then, the final questions may be settled at last and we can then know the extent to which the Standard Model needs to be revised.

"The God Particle": How Big a Deal?

Well, the latest news (e.g. WSJ, today, 'Physicists Close in on a Universal Puzzle', p. A6) is that the particle colliders at CERN (using the LHC or 'large hadron collider;') are "closing in" on the fulsome-named "God particle" (actually the Higgs boson). This is based on claims that the last few weeks have seen "an excess of events around 125 GeV" - that is, giga-electron volts of energy where 1 eV = 1.6 x 10^-19 J so that 1 GeV = 10^9(1.6 x 10^-19 eV) = 1.6 x 10^-10 J.

But when all is said and done, how big a deal is finally detecting the Higgs, really? Well, we are told that the Higgs us the only particle that the Standard Model of cosmology (and indeed, physics) says should be there ..as in exist...because it "ties together all others" and describes (or would using the Standard Model basis) how all other particle interact.

Elaborating - this so-called 'Standard Model' is generally defined as the symmetry:

SU(3) x SU(2) X U(1)

where each of the above denotes a specific matrix, or more exactly a group. See, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/04/looking-at-groups.html

In the case of SU(2) we describe it as the "special unitary group" which has the form:

S =

(a.........-b*)
(b.........a*)

where a*, b* are complex conjugates and we have (aa* + b*b) = 1. Thus the elements of SU(2) are the unitary 2 x 2 matrices with DET (determinant) = 1. These groups thus define the behavior of a specific class of subatomic particles.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking would therefore resolve this combination into constituent parts, e.g.: SU(3) associated with the 'color force' of quarks, SU(2) x U(1) associated with the electro-weak force.

One possible symmetry breaking (quark -boson format) is:

SU(3) x SU(2) X U(1) -> SU(3) + SU(2) x U(1)

which would occur at a particular ambient temperature (T_qb) for the universe at some epoch (E_qb) in the past. In the foregoing, the synthesis of SU(2) and U(1) into the locally gauge invariant electro-weak theory requires a mechanism which confers mass to three vector bosons while leaving the photon massless. This 'mass-giving' mechanism is called the Higgs Field or Higgs mechanism, and it demands the existence of one or more massive, spin-0 bosons otherwise called Higgs bosons.

The problem is, of course, that the Higgs boson remains hypothetical until formally detected (and confirmed!). Because it is hypothetical only, the Standard Model cannot be said to be complete. Therein lies the hype and the hoopla. Obviously also, since no one knows a priori what the mass of the Higgs might be, it must be hunted indirectly with ginormous collision machines such as the LHC.

But to show how commentators and even physicists can be led astray, one need only read from the WSJ piece (in synch with the earlier noted "mechanism" to leave the photon massless, that if the Higgs was found it would:

"help explain why some objects in the universe - such as the quark- have mass,.....while other objects - such as photons, the constituent of light, have only energy."

But is this really true? Consider that from very early in the last century the phenomenon of "radiation pressure" was known to exist, and it had to arise as a result of some finite (albeit tiny) mass of the individual photons. The very first experiment to detect radiation pressure was performed by the Russian physicist P. Lebedev in 1901, but the real effect was smothered by the '"radiometer effect". (This is the one associated with toy radiometers which possess one side of their rotating vanes black, which absorbs incident radiation and thereby experiences a slight push from the adjacent air-gas.) Unless a vacuum is quite good, it can swamp the real radiation pressure effect. Moreover, such specious radiometers always revolve the wrong way from what a genuine radiation force would produce.

By 1923, Gerlach and Golsen ('Zeitschrift fur Physik', Vol. 15, pp. 1-7) produced the first "clean" measurement of radiation pressure using a vacuum better than 10^-6 torr (where 1 torr = 1mm of mercury at 0 Celsius, and standard atmospheric pressure is 760mm of Hg). Their experiment was basically a test of the relationship:

c = W(1 + rho)/ F

where c was the (already established speed of light, or c = 2.998 x 10^8 m/s, W is the incident power in hundredths of a watt, rho is the reflection coefficient for the material used for the vanes (e.g. rho = 0.60 for platinum, 0.43 for nickel, 0.81 for aluminum), and F is the measured force on the vanes in 10^-10 newtons.

Gerlach and Golsen in five trials obtained an average for c of 2.98 x 10^8 m/s and to produce this generated incident power ranging from 2.78 to 6.39 x 10^-2 watts, and a measured force from 1.74 x 10^10 N to 3.14 x 10^-10 N. These results directly led to the momentum relation for photons of E = pc, where p is the momentum. Hence, if the photon has momentum - and it must to produce the force for radiation pressure, then it must have mass.

How much? Fortunately, many more refinements of differing measurement methods have enabled us to at least put a good estimate on the photon mass.

In the reference 'Gravitation and Spacetime', 2nd ed., Ruffini and O'Hanian give the UPPER limit of the photon's mass as:

m_ph < 10^-59 g

This is based on possible deviations from Maxwell's equations. Readers can see other limits - derived from experimental and galactic magnetic data here:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photonMass.html

The limit of (7 x 10^-17 eV) cited in one experiment (by Roderic Lakes in 1998) is actually about 7 orders of magnitude larger than the limit set by Ruffini and O'Hanian. However, it is much smaller than the 3 x 10^-27 eV limit..So it seems that the Ruffini & O'Hanian value is probably a reasonable limit from a number of perspectives.

Given this, we hope the CERN collision specialists appreciate the context here. And also, are able to address the question: what constraints are to be placed on the Higgs if the photon is not absolutely massless? The words of one physicist, Dr. Soldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester, echo loudly here (ibid.):

"It would perhaps be even more exciting if it (Higgs) isn't where it's supposed to be. Then we'd have to come up with something else."

Faster than light Neutrinos? Not so fast!

Yes, I have read the news that a team associated with CERN and based in Switzerland, is claiming the detection of neutrinos travelling faster than light. If correct, it would indeed overturn one of the foundational precepts of modern physics: that no material object can exceed the speed of light. But the $64 question is whether it's true or a belief based on premature data. (In any case, to be accepted, the results will have to be confirmed by independent groups!)

Let's also not forget we've had these 'false starts' before. In 2007, a team at Chicago's Fermilab believed they had similar faster-than -light results only to learn subsequently their findings couldn't be taken very seriously because the margins of error were so great that they extended to the insignificant!

Earlier, in a paper appearing in the journal Nature, in July 2000, physicists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey claimed to have "broken the limit set by the speed of light". They achieved this by firing a laser pulse into a glass chamber filled with a cesium (Cs) atom vapor. NEC’s Lijun Wang, in fact, insisted he’d created an experiment in which light speed was not merely exceeded by an added increment, but by a factor of three hundred! This meant that an almost identical light pulse exited the chamber and traveled about sixty feet before the main part of the laser pulse finished entering the chamber, Wang said.

Needless to say, this flouts well-known accepted axioms of causality. (Wherein causes are assumed to precede effects). The problem also was that the experiment has never been confirmed, so we take it with more or less a grain of salt.

Basically, in this new experiment, CERN fired a neutrino beam from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy. In so doing it travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light, defined to be at 186,282 mi./sec. The CERN team calculated the margin of error at 10 nanoseconds, which made the result statistically significant. Evidenlty also, appreciating the enormity of the find, they spend months checking and re-checking their results. According to one University of Bern physicist, Antonio Ereditato:

"We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement"

Maybe so, but that doesn't mean we instantly accept it. Recall the hallowed halls of science are littered with experiments that appeared to prove or show some fantastic phenomenon or violation of normal physical laws, but could never be confirmed. One of them was the claim for cold fusion, by Pons and Fleischmann in the late 90s, which would have revolutionized the energy industry. But no one could replicate it and it was later found that they had not taken into account all the experimental errors that migh have led to heat being evolved.

Recall (from the last instalment of 'Introducing Special Relativity), that by the work -energy theorem:

W = K(f) - K(i)

K(i) = 0 (u = 0)

K(f) = m(o)c^2/ [(1 - u^2/c^2)^½ ]

Where in this case, K(f) would be the kinetic energy acquired by the neutrinos en route to the lab in Italy. We assume the neutrinos start from rest, so K(i) = 0 and u = 0 at that point.

Here we would need to find the velocity, u. If one knows in advance the rest mass m(o) of the particular species of neutrino (there are three types: electron, mu and tau) than one can obtain u by using:


K(f) = (m'/ m(o))

where m' denotes the enhanced mass over m(o)

For example:

The normal rest mass of an electron = 0.511 MeV (Millions of electron volts)

Then, if the rest mass is found to be 3.25 MeV while undergoing K(f) one can find u. We have:

K(f) = (3.25/ 0.511) = 6.36x the rest mass

So: E = 6.36mc^2 = mc^2/ [(1 - u^2/c^2)^½ ]

and:

6.36 = 1/ [(1 - u^2/c^2)^½ ] or:

(1 - u^2/c^2) = 1/(6.36)^2 = 1/40.44

or: u^2/c^2 = 1 - 0.0024 = 0.9976

u = [0.9976c^2]^½ = 0.9987c

Note that even such a large increase doesn't translate into superluminal velocity for the electron. Now we know the three species of the neutrino have rest masses as follows:

Electron neutrino: less than 8 eV

Mu neutrino: less than 250 keV

Tau neutrino: less than 35 MeV

Let's just deal with the last and assume for the sake of argument m(o) = 30 MeV. Then we ask what it would have to be to even be at the speed of light.

In performing the computations one would find (and I leave this as an exercise for ambitious readers) that no matter how high the enhancement of the rest mass you cannot obtain a superluminal velocity.

Even if the tau neutrino mass had increased to 10 million MeV this would not disclose a superluminal speed. One would have:

K(f) = (10^6 MeV/ 30 MeV) = 3.33 x 10^4 the rest mass

whence:

3.33 x 10^4 = 1/ [(1 - u^2/c^2)^½ ]

or:

(1 - u^2/c^2) = 1/(3.33 x10^4)^2 = (9 x 10^-10)

u^2/c^2 = 1 - (9 x 10^-10) = 0.9999

u = 0.9999c

What would yield a superluminal speed? Well, an imaginary mass! Let's take the example of the earlier electron again, and allow an imaginary rest mass of 3.25i MeV (E.g. employing the imaginary number, i). Then:

K(f) = (3.25i/ 0.511) = -6.36i over the rest mass of 0.511 MeV

So: E = -6.36i (mc^2) = mc^2/ [(1 - u^2/c^2)^½ ]

6.36 i= 1/ [(1 - u^2/c^2)^½ ] or:

(1 - u^2/c^2) = 1/(6.36i)^2 = 1/(- 40.44)

(Since: (i)^2 = -1 )

or: u^2/c^2 = 1 + 0.0024 =

u = [1.0024 c^2]^½ = 1.0011 c

In other words, in order to have a superluminal speed, it would imply the increase in mass has to be imaginary! I.e. an imaginary value would have to be assigned to the mass, and hence to K(f).

Now, of course, the counter-relativists will simply insist that these equations derived from special relativity are all wrong.

Fine, then we await their new supra-relativistic physics to deliver the correct equations!

In the meantime we take their results as well......imaginary!

Of course, I'm not alone with this view. Evidently, University of Maryland's Chairman of the Physics Dept., Drew Baden, called it a "flying carpet" or something that was too fantastic to be believable. Until these guys at CERN show they don't require imaginary masses for the neutrino beam's trip to Italia, we have to concur!