From: Otto E. Rossler
To: “[email protected]“
Cc: “[email protected]“
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 10:18 PM local time
Subject: Call for help
Dear Mr. Secretary of State Westerwelle, Esq.:
No one on the planet in a high position in science or politics or the media believes me that I have given a proof which implies that the “safety conference” requested by the Cologne Administrative Court on January 27, 2011 is necessary immediately.
My excuse is that not a single scientist on the planet openly contradicts the Telemach theorem on which the proof of danger is based. (Telemach was the son of Ulysses, but TeLeMaCh also means the essence of Einstein’s early main result on gravity.)
The proof implies that the currently running LHC experiment at CERN near Geneva, Europe puts the planet and the life of every child and grown-up in jeopardy. Specifically, the currently best probability that earth will be shrunk to 2 cm in perhaps 5 years’ time unless the nuclear experiment is immediately halted, is 3 percent.
Please, be so kind as to personally present this “request for ratification of the Cologne Administrative Court’s proposal” to the 66th United Nations General Assembly.
Or if formal reasons prevent you from doing so: please, name me another delegate to whom I can turn. (Nelson Mandela would be my first choice.)
Thank you that I was allowed to turn to you,
Sincerely yours,
Otto E. Rossler, chaos researcher
The leaders of CERN are neither malicious nor conspiratorial but are determined to pursue scientific discovery at their giant collider regardless of the risks to humanity.
CERN’s own scientists have long admitted that the LHC may “become a black-hole factory” (CERN Courier, Nov. 12, 2004) and could generate strangelets (see HeavyIonAlert.org). Both phenomena have the potential of destroying the planet, wiping out humanity forever. This makes the peril far greater than international terrorism, nuclear war, asteroid impact, global warming, or any threat the planet has ever faced.
Since this is a man-made danger, it has a simple solution: turn off the Machine. In the absence of a safety conference or multi-disciplinary outside review, all experiments and operations at the LHC should be shut down by the UN and the EU — or by NATO if necessary.
Especially in view of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, CERN Council nations should halt their funding to CERN and its potential doomsday machine. Let’s use public money in the interest of the public, not just a special interest group that recklessy endangers us all.
I am a scientist. I have a name. I contradict (as all scientists do) your “theories”. So stop saying noone does. Start saying you don’t except the countless counterproofs — but that’s you personal problem. Again: not a single physicist agrees with you!
And robert Houston: are you seriously publicky calling for violent action against CERN scientists?
Prof. Dr. Peter Howell
Dear anonymous Peter Howell (you refused to tell who of your many namesakes outside the Internet you are): Contradicting is not science, but unsubstantiated public contradiction is scientific fraud.
So you now have the honorable burden to give a counterproof to the Telemach theorem unless all of your namesakes are to get into trouble. You have the planet’s floor. Thank you for having entered the ring.
Dear Dr. Rössler!
We feel the same as we are neglected by those bad guys too. But you should know: WE BELIEVE IN YOU! But we need an answer to this question: how to stop the shrinking of our cheese cake-fragments to 2 cm within 72 hours (probability 65 %; determined scientifically).
BTW: for our scheduled meeting on Dec. 24th, Sylvester & Tweety have confirmed their attendance. Will Telemach come with you or is he still in Aiaia?
Yours,
The Pinky and the Brain
http://shine.yahoo.com/event/momentsofmotherhood/laughter-is-the-best-medicine-2554317/
Dear High Delegates at the UNGA: Please, allow your hearts and minds to be moved so you can laugh and decide to open your eyes to a proven Armageddon.
Isn’t it fun? Roessler talking about scientific fraud. The person who built a career on scientific fraud (and criminal fraud, he had to return almost 1Mio$ he took for teaching classes that never hold). Roesler, you never presented any proof. It was shown so many times that you’re equations contradict Einstein and therefore emprirical evidence.
Also you were never a ‘Noble Prize Candidate’ — another poor attempt to keep whatever legacy you want to build for yourself.
And for various identities: I only found one Prof. Peter Howell on the net — me.
I am still puzzled that Lifeboat is allowing its good intentions being ruined by a maniac like Roessler.
Prof. Peter Howell
That’s different – you are the famous London cognitive scientist and stuttering specialist. I apologize.
Can we start talking ona closer wavelength?
One question for Rössler: What is the charge and mass of a hypothetical micro black hole created in the hypothetical perfect collision of two protons?
And do not forget: you are here in front of the world!
According to a CERN physicist at ATLAS, their analysis found that “the black hole mass threshold is around 9.5 TeV” and black hole production at the LHC could begin at energies of 8 to 9 TeV (Aczel, Present at the Creation, 2010, p. 212).
For different reasons, CERN’s analysts and Dr. Rossler agree on the charge of mini black holes. “In the usual picture…these rapidly discharge through the Schwinger mechanism…” wrote Giddings and Mangano of CERN. Whether through Rossler’s theory or the Schwinger mechanism of charge neutralization (or other mechanisms suggested by G&M), the charge would be neutral. (The black holes in nature are uncharged, according to Wikipedia.)
Language disabilities expert Peter Howell may need his own treatments. He wrote, “Houston, are you seriously publicly calling for violent action against CERN scientists?” No I am not. Read again, Professor Howell. I wrote, “…the LHC should be shut down by the UN and the EU — or by NATO if necessary.”
Does Dr. Howell believe that CERN leaders and scientists are so socially irresponsible that they would defy an international order and require its military enforcement?
Houston, you sould know that Schwinger and Hawking radiation are connected. Indeed is the Schwinger mechanism a hint that Hawking radiation is existing. Current experiments are confirming the existence of this radiation. According to known experts in the field like Unruh, the experimental setups are applicable to prove the existence of the proposed quantum effects at an event horizon.
BTW, this argument about Schwinger was discussed in the introduction of G&M which you have obviously read only selectively.
Again, I have not asked the propagandaist Houston but Rössler, he should tell what is the charge and mass of a black hole created in the collision of two protons? I would like to hear the answer derived from Rösslers “theory” and nothing else.
A stationary black hole formed by two collinearly colliding quarks has twice the relativistic mass energy of each and zero charge. Why ask?
So again what is the charge of a quark, why is the black hole uncharged according to YOUR theory?
And of xourse, what is the *mass* of the created BH?
Dear Dr. Rössler!
We could not agree more with what is on the flip-chart presented by you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiNfsxRsuVY&feature=player_embedded
Greetings from nobel-mice-prize winners to nobel-prize candidate,
The Pinky and the Brain
How many letters has the word Hansel?
This makes a terrible impression on the onlooking world.
No scientist being able to come up with a counterproof but the SCUN, the UNGA and the International Court for Crimes Against Humanity are all putting their heads into the sand while their existence was never challenged more strongly than by this for three years going–on biggest scandal of history.
Rössler, I have asked clear questions. What charge has a quark, what charge and *mass* has a “micro-black hole” created in the collision of two protons?
You should give the answers of course according to your “theory”.
And don’t forget, the world is watching. In a safety conference there will be no tolerance for your ridiculous game of avoiding clear answers to precise questions.
6 letters!
Uh, Rössler wants to see a “please”. The same Rössler who compared scientists for years with Nazis, criminals, psychotics and so on.
Asnwer the questions and stop the ridiculous search for reasons to avoid them. What is the charge of a quark? What is the mass and charge of a “black-hole-particle” after the collision?
Hansel, you have no authority to issue orders to Dr. Rossler or anyone here. Since you choose to behave like a social degenerate, you have forfeited any basis for cooperation. Rossler has answered your question, which you nevertheless repeat like a crazed heckler.
Nearly every statement of purported fact by Hansel has been a misrepresentation. For example, his frequent claim that Dr. Rossler compared CERN “scientists for years with Nazis” is a fabrication based merely on the term “planetocaust,” which is no more basis than would apply to astrophysicist Carl Sagan and other distinguished scientists who warned for years against “a nuclear holocaust.”
Giddings and Mangano of CERN considered the scenario “that black holes neutralize via Schwinger discharge but do not Hawking radiate,” and admitted that “our present state of knowledge of quantum black hole processes does not strictly rule out such a possibility” (p. 5). Even if one assumes that Schwinger discharge occurs only with Hawking radiation, there are several theories of reduced Hawking radiation (e.g., those of physicists Vilkovisky and Plaga), which would permit black hole growth along with the Schwinger mechanism of neutralization. This is one more gap in CERN’s safety assurances.
In fact Rössler did not answer. I never saw the charge of the quark here or the explanation why this hypothetical particle would have a charge or not according to Rösslers own “theory”. Instead of something like that he again and again tried to find some reasons for avoiding such an answer.
And Houston, your strategy and very scientific approach of word picking without understanding etc is more than just degenerate. It is pure disinformation.
Hansel considers it “word-picking” whenever my accurate quotations from official sources contradict his fallacious claims.
Dr. Rossler answered him on Sept 18, 1:59 AM and is not obliged to reply further, or at all. Hansel’s questions are usually worded rudely and couched in insults. If he seeks instruction in elementary science, he should look it up. What is the charge of a quark? Ask any high school student. (An ‘up’ quark: +2/3. A ‘down’ quark: −1/3.)
.
Houston, I (and many others before) wanted to see an explanation for his answer according to his theory. Perhaps you do not know what an explanation is. Is it necessary to explain it to you?
And: Why are you not asking similar questions? Why are you simply accepting his short answer without any explanation in the case of Rössler? At the same time you are turning around each wqord of GM, certainly without understanding and obviously only searching “evidence” for self-contradicting reasoning there. But you never do this in the case of Rössler — interesting, isn’t it?
Also — for “cherry picking” purposes — Nicolai et. al. claimed that Rossler’s idea would lead to incorrect prediction of planetary orbits — has Rossler addressed this objection in detail? This is a huge criticism of Rossler’s idea, which I have nowhere seen him address.
Als, Rossler has never answered the questions about Telemach’s effect on relativistic precession of Mercury’s orbit, and Telemach corrections to GPS formulas.
And never answered Hansel’s question about how a tiny “black hole particle” with a mass less than a Uranium nucleus can capture anything at all…leading to accretion times in millions of years or longer.
Hansel is right — if there is a safety conference for CERN, Rossler will be asked all of these questions and more. He’s be laughed out of the room before the first half hour of the meeting.
It’s amazing to me just how FEW people are worried about CERN dangers. Houston, jtankers, Rossler, a few others…a dedicated core of “true believers” that nobody listens to.
If a crank falls in the forest, and nobody is listening, does anyone care?
Rossler will never succeed in organizing a safety conference since he has no credibility. The UN and CERN simply don’t care any more — Rossler has already met with CERN scientists and they laughed him out of their offices.
Rossler knows this — his whole gambit is not about CERN or saving the world, it is about Otto Rossler drawing attention to himself, as he has done for years. Rossler is a crank and a publicity addict, and should be ignored.
Roger Buzweide, PhD
Dear Mr. Buzweide!
Do not overlook the fact that the phalanx of CERN-criticism once included the famous Pinky & the Brain. But we found out that “Telemach” in fact is “Telemachos”, were the two letters “OS” stand for Osmium, OBVIOUSLY! But CERN doesn’t use Osmium (we’ve asked via ACME-skype-account), so we are out of danger. We hope to convince Dr. Rössler on this soon. He will listen to our excellent ARGUMENTS rather than your “extravagant” criticism.
Oh no, the cheese cake did shrink to 2 cm after 4 days. We have to eat it NOW! Mjammm.
Our pleasure,
The Pinky and the Brain
My only question for Pinky and the Brain is whether lining CERN’s superconducting magnets with TOASTED CHEESE will stop black hole formation, since Osmium may well be a component of some of the electrical systems used in the LHC.
Also, doesn’t CERN’s recent (and still highly uncertain) measurement of faster-than-light travel of neutrinos indicate that cheesecake taste may be affected at a distance? And that diborane-based fungicides (the gold standard of fungus control) may no longer work, which may affect the manufacturing process for cheese?
Roger Buzweide, PhD
“Rossler knows this — his whole gambit is not about CERN or saving the world, it is about Otto Rossler drawing attention to himself, as he has done for years. Rossler is a crank and a publicity addict, and should be ignored.”
That is it exactly. So lets ignore him as he is always ignoring any kind of serious question. If he is neither able nor willing to answer them he deserves not even this kind of conference.
Dear Mr. Buzweide
Basics: Our huge knowledge on cheese-cake is nothing to make fun about!
Regarding faster-than-light speed: some amazingly precise experiments in our ACME-labs (long before that expensive CERN-LHC was built) have revealed that superluminal cheese-cake-entanglement is a fact. In contrast to Dr. Zeilingers experiment in Vienna, in our case information (we call it “crumbs”) IS exchanged.
On CERN-safety: Of course toasting of cheese does influence MBH-formation, as there is a constant relation between charge, temperature and fat in dry matter. This TeChFat-theorem will get us a trip to Scandinavia next year or so. But we have to insist that The Brain gets 2/3 of the price and The Pinky only 1/3. He ate everything after the prolific tests.
Can you proof us wrong?
Yours sincerely,
The Pinky and the Brain
It is very interesting that the convinced believers in CERN never give any scientific (proven) arguments to their loud or witty statements of faith.
Now the same institution who refuses to check an implication of Einstein’s theory (Telemach) makes world-wide money-gaining headlines with an experimental “disproof” of Einstein’s most fundmantal result.
A disproof that is proudly based on a single measurement having an awfully meager statistical significance, on one hand, and on the other — despite the many tens of authors — devoid of any quotation of Gunter Nimtz’s analogous electromagnetic experiments whose apparent superluminality is no longer a scientific riddle but a phenomenon compatible with Maxwell’s and hence Einstein’s theory (unless he successfully contradicts this consensus).
e
Dear Mr. Rössler!
Our “money-gaining headline” of the day is: “Einstein does not reply to Rössler — a clear evidence in a long lasting scientific debate!” OR:
“Fuck the speed of light in vacuum — Rössler writes a letter to Westerwelle even faster!”
Mr. Rössler, you did not realize that your “Telemach”-theorem is obsolete because of the additional “os” in the REAL name “Telemachos”. You didn’t reply, which could — from our point of view — be a part of the big CONSPIRACY! Maybe you are on the secret pay-roll of CERN? Are you actually Dr. Rössler or just writing in his name?
Prove us wrong! Why you do not reply to our scientific ideas? Why did you use the shortened and therefor un-accurate name of “Telemach”?
Our logic is sharp as a cheese-cake knife,
The Pinky and the Brain
Oh, pooor Rössler, again you are not able to explain the charge and mass of a hypothetical micro black hole according to your theory?
You are really complaining about proofs basing on only single measurementds while your own stuff is based on evidently NOTHING???
Dear Mr. Hansel!
The mass of a cheese-cake induced MBH is 4.3 crumbs, obviously (TeChFat-theorem). The proof of the cheese cake is in the eating!
For further questions call Telemachos in Aiaia: +99(0)4407342181 (Watch out! He only speaks classical Greek)
Weirder than Rössler,
The Pinky and the Brain
What I suggested yesterday is that the neutrinos act here not as individual particles but as a bulk wave, much like the photons in an electromagnetic pulse, studied by G. Nimtz.
In other words, that this is related to the — also possibly bulk-related — phenomenon of neutrino-oscillations.
And:
If collective neutrino waves exist, as suggested, they should measurably change the decay rate of certain radioactive materials — a phenomenon which has perhaps been studied already?
To conclude: This experiment proves if confirmed that neutrino bulk waves exist — nothing else. Einstein is not changed, only the nuclear industry is.
Dear Mr. Rössler!
Neutrino is the name of a weird mouse from upstairs. He is into special experiments to create drugs for old men to have more “intercourse”.
He definitely is NO BULK WAVE!
The decay rate of nuclei is changed by a different method: just count only every second second. (What a wordplay!)
Sincerely,
The Pinky and the — zoooooot — Brain
If even the swine now no longer believe in Einstein it must be safe to risk the world’s going under by ignoring his theory.
Is there no competent scientific voice left on the whole planet?
Mr. Rössler!
We believe in Einstein! (whatever this means)
Regarding your question (“no competent scientific voice left”?) we assure you: a straight YES! Listen to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqWLpTKBFcU&ob=av2e
Sleep well,
The Pinky & the Brain
It’s odd that Google never heard of the distinguished “Roger Buzweide, PhD” or even his surname. (Perhaps it’s German for “Buzzword-grazing”.) In any case, the esteemed Dr. Buzweide has written, “It’s amazing to me just how FEW people are worried about CERN dangers. Houston, JTankers, Rossler, a few others…” He suggests it should be zero and “nobody is listening…”
Whether anyone cares to worry, nature will exact it’s punishment in full for human folly. But in fact two large polls on the issue, conducted by AOL and the BBC, found that a majority of the hundreds of thousands of respondents voted to stop the LHC from operating.
Moreover, many scientists in addition to Dr. Rossler have criticised the LHC project. A number of them helped in developing an extensive, well-documented report, “Critical Revision of LHC Risks,” which was originally submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva. See:
http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/critical-revision-of-lhc-risks_concerned-int.pdf
Regarding the superluminality currently alleged by CERN before the whole planet, my friend E.P. showed me that the GPS is the weak point in a still weaker result.
To elaborate on what Otto has just mentioned, the GPS ‘Precision Positioning Service’ is that used by CERNs team for the claim that neutrinos could have been travelling faster than light.
This relies on determining the distance between the start to end points of the neutrino’s paths. But in the download ‘GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM
PRECISE POSITIONING SERVICE
PERFORMANCE STANDARD’ from the official GPS site for the public the following issues are not addressed by this system in terms of error correction:
‘2.4.5 Excluded Errors
This PPS PS does not take into consideration any error source that is not under direct control of
the Space Segment or Control Segment. Specifically excluded errors include those due to the
effects of:
• Signal distortions caused by ionospheric and/or tropospheric scintillation
• Receiver dual-frequency ionospheric delay compensation
• Receiver tropospheric delay compensation
• Receiver noise (including received signal power and interference power) and resolution
• Receiver hardware/software faults
• Multipath and receiver multipath mitigation
• Operator error’
Furthermore, the not quite so public http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gpsinfo.html shows that GPS PPS ‘provides a predictable positioning accuracy of at least 22 meters (95 percent) horizontally’. Yet this is nowhere to be found either in the above download nor in CERN’s paper.
And 20m is enough to explain the above speed of light supposedly attained.
Yet any potential detail of further analysis in the relevant search that may address this is in only a pHd of Bologna that is inaccessible to all but university members.
Eric
And we should not forget that a result that amounts to a change of the canonic value of an accepted constant of nature by 0.25 percent of one percent, is a maximally weak result from the outset.
Hence CERN has come heavily into the defense once more, this time not with recklessness displayed before the whole world but with bue-eyedness displayed before the whole world.
Rössler: Stop writing bullshit here, if you have alrready figured out the error in the observation, write an objection to the paper as a real sceitnist would do.
Hansel, wouldn’t this be the task most relevant to the physicist Jon Butterworth quoted below from the Guardian along with — more particularly — the 5 members of CERN’s partner Gran Sasso Laboratories ‘Opera’ team that had refused to sign the recent paper:
‘Luca Stanco, a senior member of the Opera collaboration (who also worked on the ZEUS experiment with me several years ago). He points out that although he is a member of Opera, he did not sign the arXiv preprint because while he supported the seminar and release of results, he considers the analysis “preliminary” due at least in part to worries like those I describe, and that it has been presented as being more robust than he thinks it is. Four other senior members of Opera also removed their names from the author list for this result.
He wished to comment, and agreed to me adding this text.’
Returning to my argument above (my 2 other doubts I had mentioned to Otto are in a broad sense relevant to above), it may well be the main distance is accurate as apparently comparing both the gps ‘l1 and L2 signals can allow for addressing atmospheric induced delay, though while not mentioned in the paper. This may explain the <2cm coordinate variations for what seems to be just one site at Gran Sasso Laboratories over a 2/3 year period of paper. Another method called rtk seems available to their gps antenna which improves accuracy by signalling with nearby ground stations.
Eric
Very interesting. What do you think is necessary to make a mean-value difference of 0.00025 physically significant?
Otto
(Iwas allowed to distribute this text by a colleague of mine, W.L.W.:)
“SN1987A, A Retrospective Analysis Regarding Neutrino Speed”
In 1987 the physics community was surprised by a fortuitous supernova.[1] The light from the supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987, and as it was the year’s first supernova, it was designated SN1987A. The parent star was located approximately 168,000 light-years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is the Milky Way’s companion dwarf galaxy. It became visible to the naked eye in Earth’s southern hemisphere.
In this observation, a star core collapsed and released a lot of energy. Most of the excess energy is predicted in theory to be radiated away in a ‘cooling phase’ massive burst of neutrinos/anti-neutrinos formed from pair-production (80–90% of the energy release) and these neutrinos would be of all 3 flavors, both neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, while some 10–20% of the energy is released as accretion phase neutrinos via reactions of electrons plus protons forming neutrons plus neutrinos, or positrons plus neutrons forming protons plus neutrinos (1 flavor, neutrino and anti-neutrino). The observations are also consistent with the models’ estimates of a total neutrino count of 1058 with a total energy of 1046 joules.[2]
Approximately three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached the Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at those three separate neutrino observatories. This is due to neutrino emission (which occurs simultaneously with core collapse) preceding the emission of visible light (which occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface). At 7:35 a.m. Universal time, Kamiokande II detected 11 antineutrinos, IMB 8 antineutrinos and Baksan 5 antineutrinos, in a burst lasting less than 13 seconds.
In this respect, a point that deserves to be stressed is that all 3 detectors observed a relatively large number of events in the first one second of data-taking, about 40% of the total counts (6 events in Kamiokande-II, 3 events in IMB and 2 events in Baksan), while the remaining 60% were spread out over the course of the next 12 seconds.
In other words, these neutrinos travelled a total distance of 5.3 X 1012 light seconds (168,000 light years), with almost half originating at roughly the same time (within about a 1 second burst of neutrino emission), and all arrived at earth (the light-transit time of earth’s diameter is « 1 second and is not a factor due to the spacing of the detectors) within about 1 second of each other. In other words, they all travelled at close to the same speed to within nearly 13 orders of magnitude (5.3 X 1012 seconds/1 second), far greater than any other measurement precision ever made for the speed of light. And, they all travelled at very close to the speed of light (travelling the same distance as the photons that reached Earth 3 hours later) at a speed consistent to c to within about 1 part per 500 million).
One would expect that since the neutrinos are emitted with potentially a range of energies, that their transit time would have exhibited a range of speeds (all in the 0.9999+ c speed range) if they were sub-luminal particles. While it has been believed that because the total ‘rest-energy’ of a neutrino is on the order of a few eV, while the rest-mass of an electron is about 511 KeV, neutrinos would all travel at close to c if they have mass and high-energy. But the energy they carry is sufficient to bring their speed to near c to only about .999999+ c if they are mass-particles, and the range in energies from pair-production should produce a spread in those speeds, albeit at many significant figures beyond the first few 9s. The calculated energy is indeed high, but not infinite. But that is not what was observed. They were observed to have all travelled at the same speed to 13 significant figures. In other words, had they had slight variations in their speed all slightly less than c, they would have had a large spread in the arrival time at Earth, on the order of days to years. The actual observation is far more consistent with neutrinos as having zero rest mass, and traveling at c, and appears wholly inconsistent with having a rest-mass and ejected with a spectrum of varying energies.
Let us briefly review the history of the discovery of neutrinos.
Historically, the study of beta decay provided the first physical evidence of the neutrino. In 1911 Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn performed an experiment that showed that the energies of electrons emitted by beta decay had a continuous, rather than discrete, spectrum. Unlike alpha particles that are emitted with a discrete energy, allowing for a recoil nucleus to conserve energy and momentum, this continuous energy spectrum to a maxium energy was in apparent contradiction to the law of conservation of energy and momentum for a two-body system, as it appeared that energy was lost in the beta decay process, and momentum not conserved.
Between 1920–1927, Charles Drummond Ellis (along with James Chadwick and colleagues) established clearly that the beta decay spectrum is really continuous. In a famous letter written in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli suggested that in addition to electrons and protons, the nuclei of atoms also contained an extremely light, neutral particle. He proposed calling this the ‘neutron’. He suggested that this ‘neutron’ was also emitted during beta decay and had simply not yet been observed. Chadwick subsequently discovered a massive neutral particle in the nucleus, which he called the “neutron”, which is our modern neutron. In 1931 Enrico Fermi renamed Pauli’s ‘neutron’ to neutrino (Italian for little neutral one), and in 1934 Fermi published a very successful model of beta decay in which neutrinos were produced, which would be particles of zero rest mass but carrying momentum and energy and travelling at c, or very low-mass particles traveling at nearly c.[3]
Before the idea of neutrino oscillations came up, it was generally assumed that neutrinos, as the particle associated with weak interactions, travel at the speed of light with momentum and energy but no rest-mass, similarly to photons traveling at the speed of light with momentum and energy but no rest-mass and associated with electron-magnetic interactions. The question of neutrino velocity is closely related to their mass. According to relativity, if neutrinos carry a mass, they cannot reach the speed of light, but if they are mass-less, they must travel at the speed of light.
In other words, in order to conserve both momentum and energy during beta decay, the theoretical particle called a ‘neutrino’ was predicted. It was presumed that the neutrino either travelled at the speed of light and had zero rest mass (most dominant theory until the 1980s) but momentum (analogous to the electromagnetic photon, which travels at the speed of light, with momentum, but with zero rest-mass), or else it travelled at near-relativistic speeds with very small rest-mass (the less popular and unproven theory).
However, with the apparent recent discovery of neutrino oscillation, it became popular though not universal to assert that neutrinos have a very small rest mass: “Neutrinos are most often created or detected with a well defined flavor (electron, muon, tau). However, in a phenomenon known as neutrino flavor oscillation, neutrinos are able to oscillate between the three available flavors while they propagate through space. Specifically, this occurs because the neutrino flavor eigenstates are not the same as the neutrino mass eigenstates (simply called 1, 2, 3). This allows for a neutrino that was produced as an electron neutrino at a given location to have a calculable probability to be detected as either a muon or tau neutrino after it has traveled to another location. This quantum mechanical effect was first hinted by the discrepancy between the number of electron neutrinos detected from the Sun’s core failing to match the expected numbers, dubbed as the “solar neutrino problem”. In the Standard Model the existence of flavor oscillations implies nonzero differences between the neutrino masses, because the amount of mixing between neutrino flavors at a given time depends on the differences in their squared-masses. There are other possibilities in which neutrino can oscillate even if they are massless. If Lorentz invariance is not an exact symmetry, neutrinos can experience Lorentz-violating oscillations.“[4]
Thus, observed oscillations in ‘flavor’ (type of neutrino based on origin source) suggested that neutrinos had a small rest mass, and therefore according to Einstein had to travel at less than c.
But do they?
“Lorentz-violating neutrino oscillation refers to the quantum phenomenon of neutrino oscillations described in a framework that allows the breakdown of Lorentz invariance. Today, neutrino oscillation or change of one type of neutrino into another is an experimentally verified fact; however, the details of the underlying theory responsible for these processes remain an open issue and an active field of study. The conventional model of neutrino oscillations assumes that neutrinos are massive, which provides a successful description of a wide variety of experiments; however, there are a few oscillation signals that cannot be accommodated within this model, which motivates the study of other descriptions. In a theory with Lorentz violation neutrinos can oscillate with and without masses and many other novel effects described below appear. The generalization of the theory by incorporating Lorentz violation has shown to provide alternative scenarios to explain all the established experimental data through the construction of global models.“[5]
If they have a rest mass, and travel at near-c but slightly below c, there should be a slight variation in their speeds based upon their total energy (most of which would be kinetic energy, not rest-mass energy). In other words, various high-energy neutrinos would travel at, for example, .99999997 c or .99999995 c, etc., and this variation in speed, however slight, should be detectable.
But the variation in neutrino velocity from c, in the 1987a data, was at most about 1/490,000,000 (3 hours/168,000 years). It was actually much closer to c than that (and most likely at c) because of the head-start the neutrinos received over the photons. More importantly, their close arrival time (40% within 1 second) implies an identical speed to 13 orders of magnitude. While they are all released as essentially prompt neutrinos, the remaining energy of the core implosion should have taken a significant amount of time to churn through the overlying massive amount of star. While one might argue that it would take less than 3 hours for the core implosion energy to reach the surface of the star, and then start its race to Earth with the previously released neutrinos, I believe this has been fairly well presented previously in the astrophysics community to be a reasonable value.
The calculations for the volume of the star that actually underwent core implosion shows such a volume at about 60 km diameter, or about 1/100 light-second, and would not have been a factor in the timing of the arrival of the neutrinos.
Most of the neutrinos released are not from the proton/electron or positron/neutron fusion releasing electron neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Rather, the energy of the degeneracy creates neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs of all 3 flavors, which travel in opposite direction (to conserve momentum). Most of the neutrinos released were therefore from this pair-production, which would have occurred relatively simultaneously (to within a few seconds) within the volume of that imploding core.
So, the spread in arrival time of the neutrinos on Earth, measured at 13 seconds, is accounted almost entirely due to the time for the pair-production and cooling to be completed. In other words, all of the neutrinos that travelled those 168,000 light years travelled at exactly the same speed without regard to their energy to within 13 orders of magnitude.
So the 1987a data show both an extreme example of exactly the same flight of time without regard to energy, and a speed almost exactly equal to c to within far better than 1/500,000,000 based on the 3 hour discrepancy of the early arrival of the neutrinos compared to the photons after travelling for some 168,000 years.
This data strongly suggests that neutrinos travel at light speed with energy and momentum, but no rest mass, as originally surmised; and not at slightly below c with some slight rest-mass, as has been the notion as of late (since flavor oscillation was recently detected).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_1987A
[2] Improved analysis of SN1987A antineutrino events. G. Pagliaroli, F. Vissani, M.L. Costantini, A. Ianni, Astropart.Phys.31:163–176,2009.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino
[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz-violating_neutrino_oscillations
The numbers shown in the second paragraph don’t show properly in the lifeboat text. You should probably edit them to read as 1058 and 1046.
(Message from Dr. W.L.W.)
If there was recently above light speed travel, why wouldn’t this have occurred from 1987a, when such arrival (as last shown) is far too late for detected ones? And to, indirectly, address Otto’s earlier question: the only way out would be if some hours (my uncalculated guess) before, within the appropriate error range suggested by CERN / San Grasso , there were also early arrival neutrinos also — though here I’m not aware of a proposed mechanism for both earlier arrival and known arrival of neutrinos from 1987a.
To reply to Otto’s earlier question, it seems to me the only way with this above light speed neutrino idea is that some hours (my uncalculated guess) before, within the appropriate error range suggested by CERN / San Grasso , there were also earlier 1987a arrival neutrinos also — though here I’m not aware of a proposed mechanism for both earlier and known arrival of neutrinos from 1987a. Such records may be around somewhere, and I expect or would expect it would be looked for.
In terms of the statistics CERN claims that their statistical evaluation involves sufficient statistical significance. The problem is the indirectness of the time determination (particularly) and the uncertainties of the models involved.
Eric
Yes. Both remarks are very fitting.
Nevertheless given the revolutionary nature of the proposition made by the CERN researchers, they ought to have pointed to the two loopholes addressed here. Then there would have been no publicity whatsoever.
Conversely, the danger they are precipitating the planet into, by not replying to given scientific evidence, indeed puts CERN and Europe into a light which will be maximally hard to repair.
Here’s a link to the first 50 comments:
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/09/call-for-help/comment-page-1
It’s great to have Eric P. and W.L.W. participating here. They are two of the keenest analysts of the planet, especially in regard to the holes in CERN science.