very awesome day....

Oh gosh, today is a physics day for me and it was fun! Didn't realized that today is this fun sia...
Today is the last session of my drawing class and we had quite a fun up there drawing each other.. and it was free style (at least for me) since I didn't really care about the grade...

And it all started after noon, we (me and friends) went to visit a physicist to know more about his work. It is about single photon implementation and I was referred to this prof by my previous prof in singapore. He is quite good at explaining things and I actually learned quite a lot of things on single photon implementation (in fact this is the first time I really see how a real experiment really works!).

After we return to our school, I decided that I will come to a our departmental seminar in X not knowing on what the speaker was going to present. Surprisingly, it was about the recent finding on the measurement of the speed of neutrinos! OMG, me being a stupid guy didn't realized that the guy standing in front of me is the representative of the OPERA experiment because he actually spent half of the seminar explaining the "general knowledge" on neutrino (surprisingly it was understandable because he actually used the same slides he used to explain to the journalists, so this is the first time in my life that I actually understand what the speaker of the seminar is trying to say.). And it was when he started to hint about the "current finding", then I realized that he might be talking about the neutrino finding! omo....

So the story is that their result on the measurement of the speed of neutrinos shows that it actually travels faster than the speed of light which is impossible according to the special relativity that says that no information travels faster than speed of light. Of course this is a very big finding and no one dares to play with it.

But it is what they have done that have impressed me and for once in my life, I really want to be an experimentalist (I actually told myself that I want to do that!hahahahaha...... blah...). They actually performed a blind experiment on the measurement. Blind experiment is basically an experiment in which you will never see the measurement result until you decide to do so. What you can only observe is the uncertainty of the measurement result. So, when they deem that the measurement uncertainty is within an acceptable range, then they will open the box and see the result. And the result shows that neutrino actually faster than the speed of light.

But,do you know how long did they spent on the measurement?
It's a f***ing 3 YEARS!!!..

Of course, what is more important is their experimental method. How do they define the speed of neutrinos? how do you measure the time? It is actually the subject of the rest of the presentation. In fact, they actually took into account of so many things to a such precision that I have never imagined that we are able to perform. They include the effect of general relativity in the calculation, effect of distance measurement (including the movement of the continent), and all sort of unimaginable factors in the calculation. Their result is also confirmed by using another independent experiment in CERN and their joint result actually shows that neutrinos still travel faster than speed of light.

What came next was very interesting, Q&A session. As expected, a lot of comments were thrown and things got even crazier when one of the audience questioned about the usage of GPS system in the measurement, and also other things. Of course, as expected, he is completely able to answer the question properly.
But seriously, I really admired them because they survived until now even though they faced a lot of scrutiny from the scientific world. What matters is that they never claim any finding and try a phenomenological interpretation on the result, although according to statistical analysis, they should be able and have the right to claim a discovery.

I don't know if they made a mistake in the experiment or the neutrinos really travels faster than the speed of light. But whatever it is, it is something that must be remembered by us because it actually shows us how the scientific world really works!  You find something, make sure that you did everything correctly, publish the finding although you know that you wil face the scrutiny form the scientific community. If it's wrong, then you admit it, otherwise stand strong.


Blah....... time for relativity homework...