World’s shortest abstract

The notion of superluminal neutrinos in 2011 was overturned in 2012:

Einstein was right, neutrino researchers admit - June 2012 Excerpt: Scientists on Friday said that an experiment which challenged Einstein's theory on the speed of light had been flawed and that sub-atomic particles (neutrinos) -- like everything else -- are indeed bound by the universe's speed limit. http://phys.org/news/2012-06-einstein-neutrino.html

Of related note:

Best Constraint On Mass of Photons, Using Observations of Super-Massive Black Holes - Sept. 2015 Excerpt: This paper details how the scientists, who work in Portugal, Italy, Japan and the U.S., found a way to use astrophysical observations to test a fundamental aspect of the Standard Model -- namely, that photons have no mass -- better than anyone before. "The test works like this: if photons had a mass, they would trigger an instability that would spin down all black holes in the universe," Berti said. "But astronomers tell us that the gigantic, super-massive black holes at galactic centers are spinning, so this instability cannot be too strong.,,, With this technique, we have succeeded in constraining the mass of the photon to unprecedented levels: the mass must be one hundred billion of billions times smaller than the present constraint on the neutrino mass, which is about two electron-volts." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120925142605.htm Question: If a particle with rest-mass were to, in theory, travel at the speed of light, would its mass actually be infinite, or just very, very, very, large, just like it would supposedly take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate the particle to the speed of light in the first place? How can you calculate this? Answer 4: A particle with non-zero rest-mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light. Put in other terms, the energy of a moving particle with rest-mass m equals E=(r-1)mc2, where the factor r=1/sqrt(1-(v/c)2), with v the speed of the particle and c the speed of light. You can use this formula in an Excel sheet to try different values of rest-mass m and speed v. This equation tells you that you need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle to (exactly) the speed of light, however, you can always take it to, say 99.99999% the speed of light with a finite (but huge) amount of energy. http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1571 "By special relativity, the energy needed to accelerate a particle (with mass) grow super-quadratically when the speed is close to c, and is infinite when it is c. Since you can't supply infinite energy to the particle, it is not possible to get (a particle with mass) to 100% c."

i.e. the next stop stop past the speed of light is the 'instantaneous' travel of quantum non-locality, with apparently no stops in between for anything with mass:

Light and Quantum Entanglement Reflect Some Characteristics Of God - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4102182 Science vs God: Bryan Enderle at TEDxUCDavis - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn7YQOzNuSc

Of note; the following recent study, through a fairly ingenious thought experiment, challenged the assumption of length contraction as being valid for 'photon clocks'. In doing so, they cleared up some loose ends in relativity concerning time's relation to space. Loose ends that had been ample fodder for much of the speculation of time travel being possible in relativity:

Physicists continue work to abolish time as fourth dimension of space - April 2012 Excerpt: “The rate of photon clocks in faster inertial systems will not slow down with regard to the photon clocks in a rest inertial system because the speed of light is constant in all inertial systems,” he said. “The rate of atom clocks will slow down because the 'relativity' of physical phenomena starts at the scale of pi mesons.” He also explained that, without length contraction, time dilation exists but in a different way than usually thought. “Time dilatation exists not in the sense that time as a fourth dimension of space dilates and as a result the clock rate is slower,” he explained. “Time dilatation simply means that, in a faster inertial system, the velocity of change slows down and this is valid for all observers.,, Our research confirms Gödel's vision: time is not a physical dimension of space through which one could travel into the past or future.” http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html

bornagain77

February 15, 2014

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Was the tweet peer-reviewed?awstar

February 15, 2014

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