You are at an outpatient building for Optical Imaging at Bethesda North Hospital after a visit with Dr. Merling for lower spinal atrophy. Home. Tomorrow you go downtown Cincinnati for an MRI for the same as your right leg has decreased in size and may be the reason for the lower back pain. Late lunch at Potbelly’s in Kenwood as you were more than half way there. You stopped at Casual Male in Kenwood for some new sweats – shorts and long – as your old sweats are twenty-five years old.
I sleep in the short boxer sweats, they are about fifteen years old and Carol said they are too worn to wear to the MRI building. It seems to me I buy too many clothes. I only wear the good ones when traveling or out to eat then change immediately upon return. I don’t like clothes to begin with, but I am no nudist which is just as well as I look a bit like old Santa physically (only I’m taller and with an existential facial appearance with summer dark Greek fisherman skin than the jolly faced Coca-Cola icon Santa most everyone knows. I wear my black wool beret (“SuperBasque Impermeable Pure Laine Fabrique en France”) almost everywhere, and, I do wear clean underwear but mostly because I would hate to be caught in an accident without it. (I listened to my mother sometimes.)
Presently you are over at Pine Hill waiting for Carol who is out for her walk. You declined to walk today because your back still hurts from time to time.
I feel bad if Carol comes over by herself, guilt that I should be where she is (or nearby) when it comes to the walking (I feel it is impolite not to); otherwise, she is on her own, she can take care of herself when she needs to. Nothing is on my mind, Amorella.
Not consciously perhaps, at least from your present prespective, but ‘stuff’ is going on. Let’s practice your lines for Saturday. - Amorella.
Home once again. You checked BBC as it is your “First Page” and saw a note on the speed of light possibly being broken. You sent it off to Doug with the physics doctorate. You are amazed to live so long to see the possibility, although more tests need be run.
I am not sure what it would mean if a neutrino can break the light barrier but it would be very, very big news. Something worthy of a front page headline I do believe.
Drop the BBC article in as it has made your day, orndorff. Afterwards I will explain why it has made your day. – Amorella.
** **
BBC News: Science & Environment
22 September 2011 Last updated at 13:28 ET
Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.
The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.
In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.
"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"
Caught speeding?
The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.
The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.
But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.
"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said. But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".
"And of course the consequences can be very serious."
** **
The reason this has “made your day” is that it stirs the pot, the mind. If the consequence shows itself repeatable then it may be deemed true. Then the question: “How is this possible?”
While your personal observation is not on the same scientific level, you would then feel it more probably to say to yourself, “How is this possible?” The this, of course, is me, Amorella, as a real entity from a dimension before if not beyond. It is fun to sense the thrill in your mind, that even goes deep enough to tickle your heart and soul a bit (in concept). – Amorella.
That may be what is in my head, but in real life, it is the science that counts more, the reality of our species living and conscious in such an environmental circumstance of a particle moving faster than the speed of light. That would be most awesome.
I can feel that, boy. Post. – Amorella.
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