Science Squabbling

Bugger is, you can't just build a particle accelerator using parts from the RS catalogue.

I dare you to try

Subject to gravitational forces.

They are massless, unless they are a Majorana Fermion then they probably have *some *mass

I saw it coming.

This comment didn't get enough 'spect.

LFGSS needs a whip a round to send you to the conference they are having so you can explain your theory.

I'd put them bang to rights.

I dare you to DIY

Fixed.

off the top of my head isnt this something to the diffuse nature of wave packets? and picking up the leading edge of the packet at the receiving end when you started the timer at the outgoing end on the peak of the neutrino wave packet? remember something like this happening at the tevatron a while ago. cox'll fix it though.

No. I've skimmed their paper and they've got that one covered. They seem to have checked all the obvious stuff by multiple different methods.

They generate a pulse of protons that's mostly a 10us long rectangle, but with some structure like a 2us saw-tooth and a smaller 5ns sine wave added to it by the accelerators that provide the protons. When the experiment is running, every 6s they fire two of these pulses (spaced 50us apart) into the neutrino beam generator which converts approximately all the protons into muon neutrinos. These head off towards Gran Sasso in a fairly tightly focused beam that spreads out to about 2km diameter on that 730km journey. When they get there usually nothing happens - the neutrinos go straight through or past the detectors without interacting. But on about 16000 occasions over the 3 years they've been running the experiment, a neutrino has interacted either with the detector or with the rock in front of it and produced a characteristic muon that has been picked up by the detector.

By putting together the time delays of all those detections and comparing the resulting frequency distribution with the shape of the proton pulses that generated those neutrinos, they work out a time-of-flight for the neutrinos.

If the pulses were purely rectangular, their result would depend very sensitively on the few interactions from neutrinos right at the beginning or end of the pulse. They do suffer from this a bit, but thanks to the saw-tooth structure of the pulse, the interactions from neutrinos in the middle still contribute something to the evidence. It's still a pretty small effect - a 60ns shift of a 10000ns pulse, and it won't take much of an unaccounted timing error to explain it away.

maybe the second hand on their stopwatch isn't working ?
that could explain the time differential

excellent! thanks for the explanations. am just on my way to read the paper! now it will probably make a little more sense.

Also, water is denser than steam.

and atypically more dense than it's solid version, too!

Bugger is, you can't just build a particle accelerator using parts from the RS catalogue.

A small device for accelerating electrons in an evacuated enclosure:
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/thermionic-valves-audio/6784101/

and atypically more dense than it's solid version, too!

I think that was my point, given the other guy thought compressing water would turn it to steam

ouch - Ive got some junior disprin somewhere..

it's easy to assume that the planes engines must produce a 100mph forward thrust to cancel a 100mph conveyor it sits on, but that is not the case, all that needs to be cancelled is the resistance from the tyres and bearings as they roll freely, so for example a thrust of 2mph may well be sufficient for the plane to remain static relative to the ground.
When the plane produces forward thrust it makes no significant difference if the ground/conveyor moves forward backwards or is static, the jets or props pull or push it through the air and the wheels are independent of that

as you know - its only airspeed that counts - a static plane in a wind tunnel will take off with enough airspeed even if the groundspeed is 0mph.

Sorry i'm no jonny ball

Didn't read all of this because I couldn't get past your use of mph as a unit of thrust, which, is a vector i.e. a form of acceleration which is mph^2 or have I got this wrong??

Thrust is a force vector, assumed to be forwards and in line with the shaft axis of an aero engine. Measured in N(ewton) these days, or lbf (pound-force) in Imperial measure.

The thrust (force) needed to overcome rolling resistance in the landing gear is obviously orders of magnitude smaller than the aerodynamic drag force, which is what thrust opposes in flight, at any speed above stall, although as with bicycles the rolling resistance can be quite a large proportion of the total resistance to forward motion at very low speeds.

so at the lhc they have seen repeated occurences of a particle exactly where they expected to see it
higgs boson alert

Higgs Boson, spotted today in my living room:

it looks like it's eaten all the higgs bosons

all this higgs boson news on the same day mary portas says british high streets will disappear ... what does she know about the higgs boson that we don't ?

It's only 2.4 sigma significance. So no cigar yet.

^ don't you have another picture of a cat ? i don't understand this ^

I'm sorry I have no cat analogy.

It's a statement of how likely the result is to be real vs a statistical fluke. Small implies very likely a fluke, large very likely a real effect.

2.4 is interesting but not conclusive, 5 is when the particle theorist lot will accept it as real.

Here's a picture of a physics cat to make up for the maths

It's a nice cat. My cat is actually registered with the vet as Higgs Boson, hence the picture up thread.

Also, even if they get to 5 here, they haven't necessarily found the Higgs. What they have found is basically a bump in the graph of number of interactions (y axis) versus energy of collision (x axis) that they can't account for with known particles.

This is hard because there are all sorts of different interactions that can happen and they all happen with different probabilities at different energies... The stats are a nightmare.

Why don't we just get the UEA on the case then?

Statistically they'll have found the Higgs Boson from the current results by tea time.

Why don't we just get the UEA on the case then?

Statistically they'll have found the Higgs Boson from the current results by tea time.

Harsh!

I believe (but could be mistaken here as I didn't follow it closely) they were exonerated in their science, but were given wrist slaps for trying to get out of FOI requests.

Facts have no place in this debate.

Not true Will, just as long as you can pick the facts that fit your theory and discard those that don't.