FTL Neutrinos Debunked(?)

So you folks probably aren't subscribed to this blog anymore, but I thought I should post an update on the whole faster-than-light neutrino saga just in case you were! Apparently, there seems to have been some faulty wiring (or faulty assumptions about some wiring — I can't quite tell exactly which) that would explain away the theoretically-unexpected result. Here's the news release. So Einstein's theory survives yet another assault . . . for now. Established theories certainly have some trenchant defenders.

Science Ethics in the News

I came across this recent story about a conundrum in research ethics: should scientists publish research on how certain mutations have made a strain of bird flu wildly more virulent, given its obvious implications for bioterrorism? This seems like a perfect case for Heather Douglas's recent opinion piece, "The Dark Side of Science" that I posted about the other week. Let's talk about it next time too.

Remember that we're going to spend a little bit more time on human/animal research at the beginning of class next time, so please bring your Resnik printout again.

Trifecta of Amazing Science News

This has quietly been an incredible week for science news. For one thing, we had a repeat of the neutrino experiment that I discussed earlier which confirmed the special-relativity-busting faster-than-light result. It might be worth pointing out of these two senses in which this experiment causes problems for understanding of both neutrinos and special relativity.

You might recall from the “Ghost Particle” documentary that we watched that the two teams resolve the anomaly of the missing neutrinos by theorizing that neutrinos “change flavors” as they pass through space, and that Ray Davis's giant neutrino counter was only set up to detect one of their three flavors. The fact that neutrinos could change implied something that no one really suspected given how weekly neutrinos interact with matter: that they have mass. For if they were massless, and traveling at the speed of light, special relativity would imply that they cannot “experience” the passage of time and therefore cannot change their qualities (as they appear to do). So the discovery that they are traveling faster than light conflicts with special relativity twice over: it conflicts with the tenet that nothing can travel faster than light and relativistic interpretation of the neutrino count anomaly experienced by Ray Davis. While I'm a non-expert on this, it seems to me that if this result is right, it implies not only trouble for special relativity (one of the best confirmed theories in the history of science) but the reinstatement of the puzzle of the solar neutrinos!

Of course, questions remain and many people are not willing to accept even this confirmed result as falsifying special relativity (even though on the surface that is exactly what it appears to do). It will be very interesting to keep an eye on this debate. We might be witnessing another scientific revolution in progress. But interestingly, it is impossible to know whether that's the case. Think about this point in the context of other scientific revolutions — like the Copernican revolution. It seems to me that this supports one of Feyerabend's points: the benefit of hindsight can have a distorting effect when we are interested in thinking about the justification of accepting certain scientific theories at a given time. . . . 

There was also a fascinating feature in Nature about physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN starting to close in on where they suspect the Higgs Field Boson (one of the remaining lynchpins of the so-called "Standard Model" of particle physics) must be hiding. They're remaining a little tight-lipped so far (basically, the experiments are done and they're attempting to analyze their data right now). But I found this little video interviewing many of the researchers quite interesting. (For background on the Higgs Field — how it fits in with the standard model —, check out this short video prepared by Fermilab.)

Finally, I wanted to bring your attention to a "seismic" discovery in Quantum Mechanics (QM) that is directly relevant to our discussion of the realism/anti-realism debate. There has been a longstanding question of how to interpret the equations of QM: should we think of them as representing reality or merely offering us a tool for modeling certain (weird) observable features of it? There have been a few camps on this question that have waxed and waned in popularity through the years. But a recent theorem strongly implies that we should be realists about the "wavefunction" in QM — a feature of QM to which many physicists want to take an instrumentalist approach, treating it as a mere statistical tool. We knew from a previous important result in QM (Bell's Theorem) that QM implies action at a distance for particles that get "entangled" (if we treat it realistically). This new result shows that "if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other. As that seems very unlikely to be true, the researchers conclude that the wavefunction must be physically real after all." Note the structure of the reasoning here:

(1) If S, then U
(2) not-U
_______

(3) therefore, not-S

(3) is supposed to give us the realist result: if a statistical interpretation of the wavefunction is not true, then we must interpret it realistically; the new theorem is (1); (2) is an assumption. So this also connects with the Duhem-Quine thesis. (1) only implies (3) with the help of (2). But while (2) is indeed quite plausible, perhaps one could simply deny it and accept that "even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other". After all, that is basically what people did in response to Bell's Theorem: they simply accepted what many found unacceptably spooky: instantaneous action at a distance. 

The Dark Side of Science

My friend Heather Douglas (a philosopher of science at Waterloo in Canada, who recently wrote an excellent book on the relation between science and politics/values), just published a fascinating essay in The Scientist: "The Dark Side of Science". We might consider making some of these issues the topic for the final days of the course.

A Novel Kind of Star

This is too cool. Computer models predicted the possibility of a star forming stellar arms in a spiral pattern (like we see in galaxies); but how good are our models? Well, just last week astrophysicists at Goddard find this "little" beauty — bigger than the orbit of Pluto.

Story here. It's not every day that we find a new type of star. . . .

Superluminal Neutrinos

I mentioned this case about the OPERA neutrinos experiment yesterday in class. Here's the original news report from Nature. It seems to me revealing of a lot of different ideas we talked about: most clearly, the resilience of well established theories being resilient in the face of apparent falsification. Think of how many people reacted to the apparent falsification of special relativity with a "ho hum: there must be something wrong with the experiment or their calculations" (without even knowing anything about the experiment). (Compare our reaction to the "pigheaded" opponents of Galileo.)

One of the most telling problems with the hypothesis that neutrinos go faster than light is that we would have noticed this before. From the news report above:

"Ellis, however, remains sceptical. Many experiments have looked for particles travelling faster than light speed in the past and have come up empty-handed, he says. Most troubling for OPERA is a separate analysis of a pulse of neutrinos from a nearby supernova known as 1987a. If the speeds seen by OPERA were achievable by all neutrinos, then the pulse from the supernova would have shown up years earlier than the exploding star's flash of light; instead, they arrived within hours of each other. "It's difficult to reconcile with what OPERA is seeing," Ellis says."

Follow-up reports offer some interesting suggestions about how the study might have gone wrong:
• "Faster-than-light neutrinos face time trial" (Nature)
• "Finding puts brakes on faster-than-light neutrinos" (Nature)
• "Faster-than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity" (Technology Review)
• "Particles Faster Than the Speed of Light? Not So Fast, Some Say" (New York Times)
The comments on many of these posts are sociologically interesting too (I tell myself never to read comments on blogs/news sites, lest I lose faith in humanity; but sometimes I can't resist).

Note one extremely interesting aspect of many of these explanations: what is doing the explaining away of the OPERA results? Relativity. What is the theory that would be "falsified" by the OPERA results? Relativity. So relativity is apparently testifying on its own behalf! On its face, this looks like a problem. Is it? (You can replace a SWA question with your answer.)

Here's XKCD's suggestion of how to monetize skepticism about skepticism:

Also: check out the abstract to this article: "Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?". It has my vote for best abstract to an academic paper for 2011.

Quantum Trapping

Well, this is pretty cool, to say the least. <heh> Hopefully it's not a cruel hoax. . . .

The Science of Creativity

On October 4th, the popular science writer Jonah Lehrer (who has done a lot of work documenting studies of creativity and decision-making) will be giving a talk on campus as part of the Bucknell Forum "Creativity: Beyond the Box". 7:30 in Trout Auditorium (Vaughan Lit Building).

This topic is obviously relevant to our discussion of the role that creativity plays in science. I've put a series of papers on this topic (including a few by Lehrer and a draft by yours truly that I'm not sure how to finish) in our Moodle site in case you'd like to read more on this.

See John Hunter's write up on Lehrer here.
Lehrer's blog for Wired is here.

Another Plug for Nature Podcasts

I mentioned the Nature Podcasts already in the Links/Resources page of this blog, but I want to give them another plug. I recently caught up with the two most recent episodes (I listen while mowing my lawn, typically, and can get through two) and was especially intrigued. Among other things, there were stories about the evolutionary puzzle of cockiness (i.e., overestimating one's capabilities), a theory about how plate tectonics might have gotten kickstarted by meteors, and Italian scientists being charged for manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake!

<Steps onto soapbox> I think it's especially important for young scientists in training (like many of yourselves) to not only learn textbook science, but to stay abreast of new developments. Spending 25 minutes a week getting the Cliffs-notes version of one of the most high-profile generalist science journals read to you, isn't a bad way to start. </Steps off soapbox>

And if you want to listen to it while mowing my lawn, that can be arranged too — I'll even lend you my iPod. . . .

Spotting Fake Smiles

I caught this on the BBC today: see if you can spot the fake smiles. I got 14/20. D'oh!