http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/02/22/einstein-was-right-all-along-faster-than-light-neutrino-was-product-of-error/
Nothing can exceed the speed of light.
That is according to the most famous physicist on earth, Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity (1905). The theory also determines that the age of something that travels fast approaching the speed of light can significantly prolong its age. This has been observationally verified with evidence of the longer age certain particle in atmosphere going down to the earth.
Then, of late, the news from CERN, the world’s largest physics lab came and made Einstein’s theory of speed of light questioned. The CERN’s scientists had sent a beam of subatomic particles, neutrinos, from Cern, Switzerland to Gran Sasso, Italy traveling 732 km long and surprisingly, the speed recorded was 60 billionths of a second earlier than if traveled by light. It's very small, but it's enough.
The result announcement soon made headlines and merited highlights.
However, the researchers’ speaker, Antonio Ereditato, don’t make any claims and still cast doubt. Instead, they ask for other researchers to carry out the same experiment in other places so that their result can be confirmed or refuted or find any mistake in that research.
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Einstein might be “wrong”. His theory might be tumbled down the way he trumped long standing Newton’s theory. But if Einstein’s theory collapses, it will corroborate other theory, the philosophy of science!
And it brings us to Sir Karl Popper.
He is the first one who defined science as it is today. Previously, since Ibn-Haytham era, the best explanation of science was the truth that came from experiments or observations. Popper didn’t satisfy with this, because this account can’t make difference science to, for instance, astrology.
Although in astrology, the prediction of zodiac draws data from biographies, but it only considers the hoped-for result, while denying and abandoning data against it. Of course, it is impossible to describe people under zodiac of cancer in one same narrative. So astrology along with Marxism, psyco-analysis are not science.
Simply put, experiment, field data, observation aren’t the underlying feature of scientific status. So now what?
Karl Popper came up with the famous criterion of scientific status of a theory which was its FALSIFIABILITY. Theory is scientific when it is vulnerable to be proved wrong, when a single data, only a single data, can prove the theory wrong. He said: “Every ‘good’ scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.”
That’s why Einstein theory is a good scientific theory, simply because it doesn’t allow others, but light, as the universe’s fastest speed. If scientists could find a thing which is faster than the speed of light, it would be enough to topple the Einstein’s theory down. And they likely find one.
That’s how Karl Popper’s philosophy of science works.
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Source:
1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
2. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
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