Daily Archives: November 18, 2011

So what happens when you lose light speed? Occupy CERN!

A theory,” Robert Frost observed, “If you hold it hard enough and and long enough gets listed as a creed.”   “And people build castles on it,” observes Old Jules.

A September report from CERN giving results of neutrino experiments might rattle some expensive real estate underneath castles so solid we don’t even think of them as ‘theory’.   Neutrino bunches, they found, were moving at speeds higher than light speed.  60 billionths of a second faster than light doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to raise a lot of naysaying and protests the results couldn’t be valid.

The experiments were repeated, this time taking into account the factors that might account for result errors.  Now those results are out.  Those Communist neutrino SOBs are STILL going faster than light speed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

Lousy news for all manner of certainties of physics stacked precariously atop old Albert’s theory that became a creed.  But nobody cares about neutrinos anyway and how fast they go.  The smart approach would be to just ignore it and not let it foul the nests of everyone working on all manner of important other theories they figured on becoming creeds.

But if you can’t trust a neutrino, who can you trust?  What other Communists and anarchists are skulking and going faster than light and not getting caught at it because it would violate the speed limit and nobody was playing cop?

The world of people who call themselves scientists because they’ve read and memorized what people getting their hands dirty put forward as theory and adopted it as a creed to say back and forth to one another doesn’t like to be banged around this way.  Yanking the rug out of things they memorized creates all manner of conversational difficulties.  Now when they say something they memorized there’s a chance someone who memorized something different will say that back.  Instead of two people reassuring one another how mutually smart they are, how well they both understand everything, you get this pack of mooshy uncertainties and blank looks.

All because of something so small nobody can see it anyway.

Who cares how fast a neutrino goes, anyway?  It doesn’t exceed light speed because 10,000 grant applications are based on premises relying on light speed being the speed limit.

Everyone hates cops and snitches.

Occupy CERN.

Old Jules

 

 

The Sky’s Too Jam-Packed These Days

Worse than the HEB parking lot.

First I was trying to chase down anything I could find about that double-helix nebula the Spitzer watched a while before it died.  There’s almost nothing about it I can find aside from the little bits and pieces just before Spitzer went south.  That helix nebula arrangement perpendicular to the galactic plane almost certainly  says something fairly strange about magnetic field behavior in the vicinity of the galactic center.  Or at least makes for an interesting postulate.  But can a guy find out anything about it?  Nada.  Nada.  Double-helix-nada.

But that got me trying to look at things happening out that way and it was no time at all I stumbled across those 2002 short-lived radio bursts from the neighborhood, GCRTJ1745-3009.  http://tinyurl.com/3kd8v.  But one of the articles about it mentioned in passing that part of the reason they couldn’t nail the source was all manner of things between here and there bending things every which way. 

I happen to be fairly interested in Sagitittarius A, [Sgr A*] and S2.  They’re in there pretty close.  So I started checking to make sure Sgr A* and S2 weren’t being pushed around and bullied by neighbors getting into their personal space. 

“Astronomers have been unable to observe Sgr A* in the optical spectrum because of the effect of 25 magnitudes of extinction between the source and Earth.”  Osterbrock, Donald E. and Ferland, Gary J. (2006). Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Active Galactic Nuclei (2nd ed.). University Science Books. ISBN 1-891389-34-3. 

25 bags of trash lying around in the grader-ditch blocking the view.  It’s no wonder nobody can see what’s going on in there.  What ever happened to the DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS program to clean up all that garbage?  Why don’t we have some jailhouse students out there cleaning things up?

But that ain’t all.  A regular guy without a lot of fancy instruments and some parallax has another problem.  There are a dozen or so regular stars bunched up standing in the way, too.  HR this that and the other.  TYC so-on-and-so-forth.  And all manner of ICRF J174 radio source nonsense.

I’m thinking of writing a State Congressman about this if I can figure out who one is.  Or maybe call the sheriff.

Old Jules

That Grader-Ditch Water Softener

I’m much thrilled about this.  That outer shell is going to help haul a lot of water, but that ain’t the half of it.

That fiberglass tube feels as though it has walls half-inch thick.  It’s evidently intended to take a lot of pressure.  Don’t know yet what I’ll use it for.

This says it had an 8 gallon per minute capacity.  Which probably means there’s an 8 gpm pump somewhere here.

Sheeze the Universe was kind to this old guy yesterday.

Old Jules