The Mythical Tunnel Between CERN and Central Italy 303
fph il quozientatore writes "Mariastella Gelmini, the Italian minister of Public Education and Scientific Research, complimented the researchers for the recent (supposed) discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos. Her press release mentions that Italy funded the construction of a 'tunnel between the CERN [in Geneva] and Gran Sasso [the labs in Central Italy].' Google maps reports the distance between the two labs as over 900km — but of course once the tunnel is open to traffic the trip will be much faster."
Future tunnel (Score:5, Funny)
He was speaking of the future tunnel that the faster than light neutrino's already know about so they can follow it.
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> He was speaking of the future tunnel that the faster than light neutrino's already know about so they can follow it.
How sexist are you?!? (Just kidding... but not:-)
Mariastella Gelmini [wikipedia.org] -- the Italian Minister of Education [governo.it] -- is female, and quite 'feminine [ads-news.com]'.
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Also the female pronoun in sentence 2.
Maria(stella) should be a fairly obvious female name in the Western world anyway.
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John Wayne's real name was Marion.
Maria could be a man.
LK
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Well, there are a few exceptions. :)
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Re:Future tunnel (Score:5, Funny)
Bartender "We do not serve neutrinos in here"
A neutrino walks in to a bar.
Re:Future tunnel (Score:5, Funny)
Bartender "We do not serve neutrinos in here"
A neutrino walks in to a bar.
and the last line:
Have you heard the joke about the faster than light neutrino?
Re:Future tunnel (Score:5, Funny)
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Faster, yes, but... (Score:3)
There's still the problem of all those pesky particles flying at high speed down the center stripe.
dual it and have 2 one way tunnels (Score:2)
dual it and have 2 one way tunnels
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>>dual it and have 2 one way tunnels
Just make sure you paint signal directional markings to provide optimal signal transfer, like a Denon ethernet cable.
Re:Faster, yes, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, and the best part is that you'll never see it coming.
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You'll see it coming after it happens.
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Which is why it must be all wrong - causality becomes inconsistent.... maybe gravity moves a the speed of massless neutrinos, and it is actually photons that have a very tiny rest mass? Has anybody measured the speed of gravity with equal precision?
If you have a neutrino emitter travelling at high speeds some distance away from you all the inconsistencies that general relativity irons out become problems again.
And what happens with red-shift... you can lower the wavelength of a photon due to red shift, but
Re:Faster, yes, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Your argument has some issues. First, the speed of gravity is theoretically c. This can be proved experimentally sometime soon. Or was. I forget. Since entropy is ambiguous in this thread you forgave me I'm sure.
Neutrinos are believed to have mass of some kind, because they appear to experience time. Neutrinos are believed to cycle over time through electron, muon and tau neutrino flavors - and cycling at some time rate based on energy levels. If the mass of neutrinos is negative it becomes a different theoretical problem with neat solutions. The Neutrinos would be repelled by, rather than attracted by, gravity. Yes, causality remains a problem in this case if the speed of light is truly broken and the observation isn't an error, because of the potential for heavier particles of greater mass and potentially much greater speeds. The actualization of negative masses does help certain other aspects of the theory though. Perhaps the red-shift of neutrinos and their higher-order cousins caused the early FTL expansion of the universe, and they're what's now slowing it down. In that case the missing mass in the universe is the negative mass of the neutrinos that expanded the universe faster than c on their way out and are now opposing the expansion of the universe with their negative mass. That would make the net mass of the universe exactly zero, which would clean up a lot of mess in the math. Energy then becomes the potential between mass and negative mass, the speed of light the dividing line between (which makes sense, as light is massless energy). Energy becomes the attracting force that pulls the negative and positive masses together again in the end. The gravity force becomes the equivalent of energy shifted into the mass dimension. Our entire universe becomes a temporary twitch in higher-order math: a ripple in dimensions beyond our ken - a single bubble in a fleck of foam on the crest of a wave on an endless sea made turbulent by winds beyond our imagining, that blooms once and bursts or shrinks again, absorbed by an uncaring sea. Its duration would be the level of incursion of one higher-order plane on another.
Since the neutrinos and their higher-order negative mass FTL cousins experience time in what we would consider the reverse then naturally our big bang was their big crunch. Our big crunch will be their big bang. It would make sense that the positive masses exactly equal the negative masses, that the highest density of mass in this negative mass universe is exactly the same magnitude of ours (galactic core black holes with negative mass) and that though from our current view of time their mass inhibits ours by being outside our known universe's perimeter pressing it in, from their point of view we are the negative mass preventing the expansion of their universe, and presently pressing it in toward its end. Time starts and as the masses and negative masses disassociate on their grand loop, time slows until it reaches some apogee prescribed by its cause and stops, and then reverses gaining speed until it meets its opposite mirror and stops. It's grand symmetry, and it would make perfect sense if my perfect mirror were posting this comment on gro.todhsals out there somewhere, though it's not necessary for that to be true for the math to work out.
This may do away with the the cyclic inversion theory, or "string of beads" because time itself loops back with its opposite and the beginning is also the end. There may be exactly one, which cleans up a lot more math.
Really, who needs causality anyway? It's getting in the way of a lot of interesting stuff.
If the mass of neutrinos is an imaginary number, well, things get a little fractal from there as the picture gets more beautiful and more inscrutable.
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"Which is why it must be all wrong - causality becomes inconsistent"
Or special relativity is wrong. Which seems more likely assuming that this is a real result. And I think that if special relativity is wrong then Maxwell's equations must be wrong too.
There's also the possibility of something akin to the alcubierre drive. Somehow, via physics we're getting our first glimpses at now, very high speed massive particles warp space in a way outside of general relativity.
Exciting times.
Tim.
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maybe (...) it is actually photons that have a very tiny rest mass?
I was wondering the same thing. How has "c" ever been measured? By using rays of light, right? What if it turns out they have never really measured c, only the speed of light which is slightly slower than c? And maybe the neutrinos are not faster than c, just faster than light because they have an even lower mass than the already tiny mass of photons? Maybe they have just shown that "speed of light" < "speed of neutrinos" <= "c".
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For example, in our solar system, we have a number of planets orbitting the sun at various distances. What happens if the sun suddenly popped out of existence, how long before each of the planets stops following the previous orbital path because there is no longer a massive gravity well at the center of the system?
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I think you are the one who doesn't understand the science here. Einstein's theory of relativity includes relativity of simultaneity: two observers will not always agree whether or not two events happened simultaneously, if one happened before the other, or vice versa. This is not a problem as long as the events could not possibly communicate with each other in a way that violates causality. As long as information can only travel at the speed of light or slower, no observer will ever see something happen be
What if speed of light is not the limit speed (Score:2)
from what I recall, special relativity can be seen as stating two things:
- there is a maximum speed and because it's not infinite you need the Lorentz transformation
- light travels with this maximum speed.
If for example there had been a later discovery that light had mass, then light would not travel at the maximum speed. Now there have been very accurate measurements showing a ridiculously low upper limit for the mass of photons, but the idea of photons having mass does not by itself contradict special rel
The tubes were there... (Score:3, Informative)
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they are about the size of your balls. That makes them nearly undetectable.
Neuterinos?
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>>German for new Terinos
This is Italy, they all drive Gran Terinos.
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Is it high school again in here? Damn those neutrinos...
sure looks like she was misinterpreted (Score:3)
It sounds like she's saying that Italy contributed to the tunnel, through which the experiment took place, by way of contributions from Gran Sasso Labs totalling 45 million euros. Bad translation into English, and possibly bad sentence structure in Italian. (I don't speak Italian so I can't judge.)
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so you really think this 900 km tunnel
exists, do you?
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I believe in the tunnel. I just believe it's only a few neutrinos wide.
Or perhaps to put it another way: for a neutrino, everywhere is a tunnel.
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From the italian press release: "Alla costruzione del tunnel tra il Cern ed i laboratori del Gran Sasso"
It seems the word "tunnel" is shared between English and Italian. That said, the cultural context and definition /could/ be different, meaning instead not a literal tunnel but ... ahh whatever.
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Yes, but it is clearly an English word, used in Italian. While not an expert Italian speaker, to me the use of the word "tunnel" seems odd, since the word often used for a literal tunnel is "galleria". According to one website, there are some idiomatic uses of "tunnel" in relation to drugs, so perhaps it has some other meanings which may make more sense in the context of this quote.
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Perhaps it's Engtalian rather than Italian. :D
You're always hearing odd English phrases and words in sentences, even when they have a word in their language for it already.
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It's probably Italish rather than Engtalian.
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No, it was not... (Score:5, Informative)
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She wouldn't have been the first to assume there was a tunnel.
Many posters here on slashdott had to be reminded that there was no tunnel in the prior post on this subject.
Apparently the idea that you can send tiny particles thru the earth itself is a difficult concept to get across.
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Translation : a politician.
If you think that's news, welcome to planet Earth.
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Every democracy has government department head who are politicians or professional administrators, and very few are professionals in the field. This is by design.
There is no swoosh here, except over the heads of people naive enough to think administrators work their way up from the ranks.
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if the concept of particle traveling through matter is too difficult for her to grasp, she should step down and leave to the job to people maybe less attractive (the main reason she's there) but more competent.
You got me to click through to TFA, but where's the pic?
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Bad form, replying to self, but I found a pic!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_OjHZJ0p3NPI/SwNY8JRh5XI/AAAAAAAAAIw/pMNkZxVeDlI/s1600/gelmini.jpg [blogspot.com]
She can stay!
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Even if I knew nothing of "nucular" physics, I would still have doubts about existence of man-made +700km long underground structure.
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Since CERN is the leader in QM research (Score:2)
Would this be a Quantum Tunnel?
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Would this be a Quantum Tunnel?
It might be. It might not be. And it might be and not be simultaneously.
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Yes. They just forward biased a tunnel diode to cause quantum mechanical tunneling, which of course got through all the dirt and rock because they exhibit negative resistance.
what a shame (Score:2)
If that's what she said, it's tragic other than funny. This administration of sad clowns, old thieves, and incompetent assholes (except perhaps the finance minister) has to go. The sooner the better. And i say it as an Italian who lives in LA but goes back yearly and still loves his country.
I must be missing something (Score:2)
because all I get out of that release is:
- The neutrino can travel faster than light, good job scientists.
- We [Italy] spent a shitload of money to build a tunnel to make science happen, GOOD JOB US!!
- We continue to spend shittonnes of money to make science happen.
- All praise Italy!
I'm glad somebody out there is funding science, but why is she focusing on Italy's achievement to fund a science and not the scientists and the implication of their finding? I'm missing why Italy's contribution to CERN is worth
Re:I must be missing something (Score:5, Insightful)
1. No such tunnel exists.
2. It would have to be hundreds of miles long, so tens of millions of Euros wouldn't make a dent in construction costs.
3. Neutrinos interact weakly enough with matter that they can be beamed through solid rock without much trouble, so a tunnel is unnecessary (even undesirable).
4. Faster than light neutrinos have not been "discovered" per se. The guys published their results in hopes that someone will find an error, or (mmmaaaybbbeee) in hopes that their results will be reproducible.
5. Faster than light neutrinos would require huge revisions to modern physics. For instance, under special relativity a faster-than-light particle time travels and destroys causality.
6. In light of (5), extreme caution should be taken in accepting and verifying these results. Congratulating scientists for their amazing discovery now is, to say the least, premature.
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Actually from what I recall, special relativity can be seen as stating two things:
- there is a maximum speed and because it's not infinite you need the Lorentz transformation
- light travels with this maximum speed.
If for example there had been a discovery that light had mass, then light would not travel at the maximum speed. Now there have been very accurate measurements showing a ridiculously low upper limit for the mass of photons, but the idea of photons having mass does not contradict special relativity
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I recall the days when slashdot was solid as a rock. Now in between the error messages you manage to squeeze in a post and after a while you find out if the post succeeded or not.
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They've used the distance along the earth's surface and forgot the neutrinos elect to go in a (shorter) straight line...
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I'm afraid current thinking is that neutrinos absolutely definitely 100% have mass, and that no matter how small that is, would mean that them travelling faster than c really is quite a big deal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation [wikipedia.org]
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Not that I disagree with anything you say, but I was just referring to the part
Neturinos are (mostly) the former, and for all practical purposes [a massless, noninteracting particle].
If the GGP wants to rename c to "speed of massless, noninteracting particle", by all means, but that particle would not be a neutrino.
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> - We [Italy] spent a shitload of money to build a tunnel to make science happen, GOOD JOB US!!
> I'm missing why Italy's contribution to CERN is worth 50% of that press release.
I agree.
What is missing is that the Italian economy is in a $#!+|0@& of trouble (but it's fixable) [time.com], and this neutrino media release seems to make spending $#!+|0@&$ more into a virtue.
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"build a tunnel"
The tunnel doesn't exist. Fucking morons.
FTL travel without [wikipedia.org] space warping [wikipedia.org] will get you news from the future.
Politicians should at least understand economics (Score:3)
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I don't know what is worse. That she believes the tunnel exists, or that she believes that 45 million euro is a significant contribution towards building a 900km long tunnel that doesn't actually exist.
FTFY :)
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I don't know what is worse. That she believes the tunnel exists, or that she believes that 45 million euro is a significant contribution towards building a 900km long tunnel that doesn't actually exist.
FTFY :)
Ah, but 45 Million euro is far too much for a 900km-long imaginary tunnel! I can build an imaginary tunnel 5 times as long for only 9.99 million Euro (99 cents).
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...but those were due to unforeseen circumstances...
When building an imaginary tunnel, I imagine most circumstances are "unforeseen"; also "unseen".
Translation looks accurate (Score:2)
(Disclaimer: I don't speak Italian)
The word used in the Italian is "tunnel". At first I thought that this might be an example of how one shouldn't always translate a word as the closest sounding word in the target language, since the most closely etymologically related word may not be the most semantically close. This is how we get Dante's Inferno rather than just calling it "Hell" which would be a more accurate English translation. At least once in science this has created a real problem in the past, ab
Question (Score:2)
I think you've found the source of her confusion. (Score:2)
I think you've probably pinpointed the source of her confusion.
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Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
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That's a heavy sheet. I'm betting it's not very good for making airplanes.
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The common rule of thumb for neutrinos is that it take a sheet of lead one light-year thick in order to stop 50% of the neutrinos directed at it. Wow!
Sorry, I can't do that calculations. What's that in neutrino-years :)
There is a tunnel (kind of) (Score:3)
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Research/CNGS-en.html [web.cern.ch]
PPTP saves the planet. (Score:2)
I have a tunnel between my router in New Zealand and a customer in the US of A
Once I've finished with it you are more than welcome to drive your car through it...
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But.... I wouldn't download a car.
Hi, I'm a faster-than-light nutrino! (Score:2)
And to me this story is old news.
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And to me this story is old news.
No, from your point of view, it hasn't happened yet.
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The thing about Slashdot is that you could be a slower-than-stopped particle, and the news would still be old.
(if you can have a particle that goes faster than light, then a particle that goes slower than stopped is surely possible!)
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No big deal (Score:2)
Yes, there's a tunnel! (Score:3, Informative)
Gran Sasso is a mountain in eastern Italy. About 25 years ago, a tunnel (of the traffic kind) was made underneath the mountain. Physicists saw this as a great opportunity to build a particle physics lab, using the mountain as shielding from cosmic radiation. Usually such experiments (such as dark matter detectors) are placed deep underground in hard-to-get-to mines, but this lab is great since you can literally drive up to it. The lab is comprised of three (very) large sections that are right off of the main road.
Italy paid for this tunnel and the carving out of the lab space. Maybe she was confused or maybe the translation was poor, but Italy did indeed fund the construction of the tunnel underneath Gran Sasso as well as the laboratories underneath the mountain. So give them credit there.
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900 km? (Score:2)
Did the poster even read the neutrino-story he quotes? The key number of 732 km should be fairly clear in everyone's mind by now...
Why the 900 km figure? Is it just more sensational as a puny 732 km?
As for the translation which started this nice story, I would be careful. I learned enough foreign languages to know one thing: Every language has its own subtleties (which may vary from region to region or with social status or through any number of other factors). In this context the word tunnel may not be mea
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Given that all my Italian friends have already started laughing at this before this article even appeared, I'd guess the translation was accurate enough.
Yes, basically, the person in the article did honestly think there was a physical tunnel between the two, and didn't understand what neutrinos are anywhere (because they wouldn't exactly be "herded" in one direction by the walls of a tunnel).
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Here, go read all 1036 comments [slashdot.org].. You'll have a headache and some eyestrain but you will be much smarter.
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Looks like someone doesn't understand how the slashdot effect can apply to email addresses, angry nerds, and mailbombs.
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http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/09/25/227228/accent-monitoring-innovation-or-rights-violation [slashdot.org]
racist troll would have been somewhat more on-topic in this thread
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Yes, being hypersensitive about race to the point of not being able to have legitimate scientific discussions about things like this is a problem.
Pissed-off people like this AC aren't helping the situation.
Re:Darkies (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm black and I score at least three standard deviations above the norm on IQ tests.I don't buy the culturally biased bullshit about the tests.
Unfortunately there's an anti-intellectual theme in much of African American culture. Through peer and societal pressure, black kids learn to under-perform.
If I'm black and I can do well academically, then others can too. Just pull your damned pants up and read a book.
LK
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Don't get me wrong, but if you say
"I don't buy the culturally biased bullshit about the tests." and then add "black kids learn to under-perform."; isn't that kind of contradicting yourself ?
Personally I'm convinced that *on average* IQ (**) is pretty much equal amongst all people, regardless of their genetic inheritance but that culture (nurture if you like to make the time-line a bit shorter) is a major driver on whether people will score good on these tests.
(**: if there is such a thing... IMHO most of th
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I'm being lazy due to the lateness of the hour in my geographic location.
That's ok. I'm being lazy because of my skin colour.
I mean color.
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The thing is you are being racist therefore most people will disregard what you say as nonsense due to their social programming regardless of any possible truth in what you say. The problem is that the anti-racism programming disallows any discussion of difference between races.
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Being nice, and giving her the benefit of the doubt, you can forgive her for thinking a "tunnel" between the two places was necessary. Even if she's minister for Science, she is still just a politician. However, even more embarrassing is the failure of common sense that led her to