Nuttin' Is Faster Than Light

Nuttin’ Is Faster Than Light, Boys, ‘Ceptin’ Maybe a ’56 Chevy! – Al “The Kid” Einstein, 1915

Oh! Dear God, Albert! Apparently There IS! – Ralph B. Strickland, Jr., 2012

[Here is a joke you will understand at the end of this article:

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.]

The speed of light in a vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics, as you might expect. If you didn’t expect that, expect it now.

This speed of light everywhere in the Universe is approximately 186,282 miles per second. Al, I’m sorry, but that will out-drag a Chevy.

According to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, c is the maximum speed at which all energy, matter, and information in the universe can travel. It is the maximum speed of EVERYTHING! Nothing goes 186,283.4 MPH. The light from our Sun takes approximately 8 or so minutes to get to Earth simply because the Sun is about 90 million miles away, give or take a stone’s throw or so.

BUT HOLD YOUR FERMIONS!

May we now look at the neutrino in relation to the speed of light? Say yes because we are going to anyway.

1. Neutrinos are created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay and then they are off and running.

2. A neutrino is an electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle. That’s sad, isn’t it?

3. The neutrino means "small neutral one" in Italian or “Chuck Schumer” in Farsi.

4. All evidence suggests that neutrinos have mass and that their mass is tiny even by the standards of subatomic particles. A tiny mass means a small religious service and who knew they were Catholic, anyway?

5. Neutrinos do not carry an electric charge, as you know from my previous BLOB Article on Physics, and that means that the electromagnetic forces that act on charged particles such as electrons, protons and porn stars do not affect them. Really, I just make this stuff up as I go along.

6. Only the weak nuclear force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and gravity, affects neutrinos because they are relatively weak on the subatomic scale.

7. They are therefore able to travel great distances through matter without being affected by it.

8. Don’t panic – but they pass through you all the time and you never know it – and they do you no harm. Nobody knows for certain about the harm of your cell phone.

In September 2011 scientists at CERN (the European high-energy physics consortium) announced that they discovered that neutrinos, mere particles or fermions, travel faster than light!

They were just running a little experiment and WHAM! The impossible happened. You see, they fired neutrinos 454 miles from Geneva, Switzerland, to an underground lab in Gran Sasso, Italy AND THE NEUTRINOS BEAT LIGHT BY 60 NANOSECONDS! That’s not very long but it was also very impossible.

Here it is in February 2012 and they have checked and rechecked and the neutrinos are still faster than light. They are calibrating all the machines and their particle gun. Still, they can’t slow the little bastards down and if they don’t all we know about physics is plain wrong.

Charles Krauthammer, MD and JD, called this mind-boggling and explained it this way: suppose you had a neutrino gun aimed at a metal plate 454 miles from the gun and scientists with a telescope were standing next to the plate. Those scientists would hear the neutrinos strike the plate before they saw the other scientists fire the gun!

Just think about that! Physics on its ear! Einstein’s theories all wrong! The finding even opened up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect. Just the same results as a six tequila shots.

If we eventually can send information back in time I’m changing all my 8th grade math scores.

Scientists are trying to replicate this experiment proving the neutrino’s speed wrong. So far, neutrinos are winning. And it is important that they do not. You just can’t go round having neutrinos kicked out of bars they have not yet entered.

Take two Excedrin Migraine tablets and don’t call me in the morning.