Hoping that an experiment produces a certain result is perfectly fine...

There's a difference between hoping for a result and simply assuming things with no evidence

Hoping that an experiment produces a certain result is okay as long as you are a bystander who cant influence the result. Here, however, we are talking about physicists hoping for a result in an experiment done by physicists.

The double blind experiment was created precisely for this reason; because people who have anything to do with a test hoping for a certain outcome of that test is absolutely not okay.

If it is possible to make these experiments double blind I would hope that this is what they do because of the implications of the results and the communities already obvious aversion to one of the two possible results.

There's no placebo effect in physics, and the things that we're measuring aren't subjective.

I of course agree that there's a risk of bias in physics and that that sucks, but I think comparing it to the risk of bias in medical research is pretty ridiculous. And, of course, what I was responding to was your ridiculous statement that physicists hoping for a certain result somehow suggested that science is another religion.

Meh I think I disagree. Although I think you are misquoting me about the religion part.

"Asking" a scale several times won't change the answer. "Asking" a timing device several times wont' change the measurement.

Asking a person several times if their headaches got better may change their answer. And that's the problem. If I know it's a placebo, I might be satisfied with the first answer, but if I know it's the drug being tested, I may subconsciously decide to ask "are you sure?" or something like that. Instant bias, since I might not (as frequently) ask the placebo group the 'verifying' question. Or maybe I will, but the inflection may be different, which may affect the answer.

Electrons/neutrinos/etc can't be swayed as easily.

Lol... wat? These concerns are ridiculous with the standards in experimental high energy physics.

I think that is a very good point, and I think your post makes me sound ******ed now But in my defense, I dont think your analogy is very strong. It is not as simple as looking at a scale, and I would assume it involves very many people.

But even if it was as simple as looking at a scale, I think its like "if i write down that this scale says 1, all my family and friends and everyone will know i spent the last 20 years of my life on bunk" is possible in this scenario.

And even if that is not the case, I personally believe if you are doing science in order to discover what you want to be true then you are doing it wrong.

They probably measured it incorrectly, if anythings wrong with the study its probably gonna be human error and in terms of the universe and the precision of the instruments added to the fact we really have no real understanding of how the universe works, there is surely gonna be a lot of scope for them to think they've reached the holy grail when they are probably light years away, excuse the pun

Now you're talking about outright fraud (writing down 1 means ..., so I'll write something else).

Double blind experiments don't prevent fraud. If I want to ignore the data and get the result I want, I can do it under any protocol. Well, short of just handing it off to someone else and having nothing else to do with it. But that person can commit fraud.

Indeed they do! I specifically recall one of the reasons why the double blind experiment was created, in which (very vaguely, via my memory) doctors had results in envelopes and they were caught holding them up to the light. I dont know If I can find a link to this in the next five minutes but I will give it a shot.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...pe&hl=en&gl=us
I think the way I heard about this (the general concept, not this particular instance quoted in the above) was on the SGU. I'm interested now so I will probably find the episode sometime this week and shoot u a PM if u want.

Again, they dont' PREVENT fraud. From the free dictionary: "a double-blind procedure is used to guard against both experimenter bias and placebo effects"

From what I've read, you can still introduce fraud in statistical tests of the data or inject additional data points into the data (or maybe even change the data around). Just as your 'envelope peerer' was trying to do.

Not necessary, as you aren't really showing what you think. There may be some forms of fraud that may be prevented or made more difficult to do with a double blind, but I'm sure if one wanted to they could still cook a double-blind experiment.

lol you're such a conspiritard coffee monster

"Now I've convinced the whole day long, that all I know is always wrong...."

The levels of physics we don't understand likely make what we do understand look insignificant (though I'm glad we know some of it!).

I liked that too. Would kind of suck to realize that you spent your entire career doing stupid string-theory crap that turned out to be total nonsense.

That gets confusing as to when it's m and when it's im .. just use 'm' for the mass , which can have imaginary values

We have never observed any neutrinos that have speed much slower than light either .. doesn't mean there aren't any.

Also, how would you propose measuring the speed of neutrino that is moving at 141c or whatever? There could be such neutrinos coming from the sun, but we never realise because we don't know what order the received events were emitted.

It doesnt get confusing if one is familiar with the fact that for all real particles E^2=p^2+m^2 so a minus sign is easily the tachyon case as only there the total energy is less than momentum (if one wanted to always have equations with real numbers and used the measure of the mass).

Also (regarding speeds always close to c) it means that its hard to get them to small speeds because its hard to produce them in a way that their total energy is not many times over their assumed small rest mass (they think less than a few eV so far). This is a result of relativistic decay dynamics. Basically they always take away significant fraction of the excess available energy for the decay that is many hundred times a few eV. So they are in all natural processes produced at enormous gammas very close to c by two or more 9s (result of conservation of momentum and energy) . To produce them you need nuclear reactions or decays of mesons etc (weak force). You cannot have nuclear reactions that neutrinos are produced with say 2-3 eV total energy. And thats why we cant observe them at any smaller than 0.9..c type of speeds. If one could find a way to decelerate them maybe, but hard to design it.

And there have been other experiments like that in K2K that the neutrinos had energy only 1GeV (20 times less) and then the speed would have been 1.01c which is a lot easier to detect because within 250km they had in Japan that means easily 8340 nsec earlier arrivals that is 139 times larger than the G.Sasso time difference which means a lot easier to measure if they wanted beyond any experimental uncertainty nomatter how bad one messed up timing or distance. Look also at the energies of the MINOS experiment to see if they had small enough energy to correspond to proper speed under this tachyon idea.

Also you have supernova ones that in 1987 with less than 1Mev energy (ie my example initially) they would have had 141 c and they wouldn't have arrived just 3 hours earlier as observed but many thousands of years earlier ie we would get absolutely no signal nearby the optical one.


But of course they are not tachyons for this and other reasons and whatever causes this result if not 99.99% experimental screw up, may very well have such dependence with energy that it doesnt produce significantly over c speeds elsewhere in our experiments as a tachyon would but only in very high energies.

Always remember that its very hard to measure their speed since it has to be so close to that of light and their creation and detection can never be perfectly known for a single one unless one had a massive experiment that lasted years and had beams every few seconds with only a few protons significantly separated to each other timewise. In principle they sent ~10^20 and detected 16000 so basically if you were able to send 1 proton (tough enough as this is anyway) every 1 msec (time of flight near 2.5ms) for safety of identification, you still wouldnt get a single detection after many years with enough probability to be safe. So it gets extremely tough to measure them properly like that and you use beams of many with all the problems this introduces. Still i suppose future experiments can improve on proton beam intensity (luminosity) and reduce its duration to shrink even further the experimental errors or play with the duration as parameter to spot where the systematic error may be hiding.

this confuses me and I am total physics noob however I have good instincts with this **** because its ying yang duality relativity bollocks

how could something be faster than light be observed when observation itself is created by light?

if it was only slightly over, then this is easily explained by a lag, with the time it took+the time it took to become 'real'

I mean, speed is a load of **** really, everything is instantaneous, its just the observation lag which makes things seem faster slower (btw how do you distinguish between fast and and slow? 'zoom in/zoom out'. theres more buls****, this one way linear direction of time, all it is is an idea, and with light, thats just **** in our observation, stuff in the 'not light' has no mass, how the hell would mass be created anyway, where would it come from? There is nothing, how big is nothing? Just like that zoom in zoom out, forward/backward, before and after, light and no light, which is which and which is right?

Its quite enlightening when you realise there is actually nothing, but light and no light and they aren't even different, All these equations, all these observations, all bull****, its just a location in the nothing, with perfectly analogous infinity, so when you do zoom in, things are going to be analogously different, 'faster than the speed of light' why should light be uniform when infinity and nothingness is so big, we can't notice everything because brain is slower than light, lag.

Yeah I talk ****. sorry


BLUE = True
RED = Outer Limits Drivel

wat

speed of light is derived from the perception of distance and time, it takes x time to travel x distance, both of which are a load of ****. If something is infinite it cannot be divided up into values, perfect analogue cannot be observed, thats why **** flickers in and out of existence, thats why nothing touches, if it was only ever so slightly faster than the speed of light then maybe the speed of light was slightly faster there and then, or there is lag, or the distance was perceived shorter, lots of ****. Basically everything is a load of bull$hit imagined ideas. And again I really cannot comprehend logically how something faster than the speed of light can be observed as real when observance and reality is light based.

Scientists also have this dumb big bang idea, where everything came form a singularity, HELLO EVERYTHING WAS AND IS ALWAYS A SINGULARITY IN REALITY AND A SINGULARITY IS IMPOSSIBLE IN OBSERVATION (otherwise we would have a perfect universal unit of measurement and the impossibility of a created finite universe being spited)

simple ****ing logic,

and this plankt bull**** too god don't get me started. EVERYTHING REVOLVES AROUND US BECAUSE WE SO AMAZING WITH OUR PATHETIC LITTLE BRAIN WAVES

RED = Outer Limits Drivel

Please don't get this moved to the outer limits thread.

@ 7:55, I think its pretty obvious (not just to me, right?) that you would assume, assuming what he assumes for the thought experiment, that the neutrinos and the light left at the same time, and your hypothesis for why neutrinos had to leave earlier was created under the assumption that neutrinos didn't move faster than light.

(1) True
(2) True
(3) False

Honestly, there's not much correct in what you say. I barely know where to even start. You should maybe start with a basics physics book and then move on from there.