NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Tom Sult
Date: 2011 Sep 26, 16:40 -0500
Thomas A. Sult, MD
Yes the CERN OPERA experiment showing that perhaps neutrinos travel faster than light in very interesting. Of course, there may be an explanation in terms of some small experimental effect that�s been overlooked. The excess speed is just about 0.0025%. (I imagine they corrected for the known delay of light in a gravitational field.)
But if it turns out that they are, indeed, traveling slightly faster than c (speed of light) in the same gravitational field, I wouldn�t be surprised because GR (general relativity) is purely a classical theory (non-quantum mechanical). It treats light as waves, not as zero-mass particles (photons). I have been able to show that GR predicts a neutrino of arbitrarily small mass, traveling exactly at speed c in a circular obit around a black hole, would have an orbit 78% larger than that of light. Furthermore, GR gives solutions for the neutrino�s orbit at speeds greater than c.
I believe this demonstrates that GR is unable to handle quantum particles of extremely small mass, such as neutrinos, and that we need a yet-to-be-developed quantum-gravity theory to explain the behavior of neutrinos in a gravitational field. Any suggestions?
This is off topic for the NavList. But I couldn�t help myself.
JK
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