Great Scott!

By now, you've either heard from me that CERN found faster-than-light particles, heard it from the news, or just not heard about it at all (in which case, don't you dare stop reading). This finding has turned the scientific community for a loop, and no one quite knows how to react. The popular news has been reporting it as the end-all-and-be-all of physics discoveries, but that's not true at all. To be sure, the significance of this find is mind-blowing, but I'm willing to bet that reporters took the ambitions and cautions of scientists (wild things, they are) at face value, instead of looking at the facts. 


You and I know better.* 

...or is it?

You know that article I just wrote? Hold on to your hats, kids. These neutrinos may have just broken the speed of light. This... is interesting.


http://news.yahoo.com/particles-recorded-moving-faster-light-cern-164441657.html
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EDIT: Here's an article about the experiment from a much more... scientifically sound source:


http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/09/neutrinos-travel-faster-than-lig.html

It's All Relative. Really.

In the wonderful world of Physics, everything can be categorized with four adjectives: big, small, fast, slow.

Physics is pretty much like Sesame
Street, in that sense.

Seriously, though, these qualifiers are what physicists focus on when evaluating anything. In fact, there’s a branch of physics for each combination, and unbeknownst to you (or perhaps fully beknownst), we’ve already covered a lot of these concepts ourselves:

Slow and Big:	Classical Physics (The Tides, Gravity)
Slow and Small:	Quantum Mechanics (Quantum Dots)
Fast and Big:	General Relativity (Time Travel)
Fast and Small:	Quantum Field Theory (Higgs Boson)

The fascinating thing is that one man almost single-handedly made all of these possible: Albert Einstein. In 1905, Einstein published a set of papers establishing his ideas on Special Relativity, considered by far the most groundbreaking theory in modern physics. They revolutionized the way scientists thought of the Universe, and made further developments in both science and technology possible. This is all great news, and I’m sure you’re jumping out of your chair with joy, but… what did his papers actually say? What makes Special Relativity so special?

Nope.