I don't dodgy trust media reporting of science, which in turn leads to PR-focused hacks being mistaken for scientists.
I do trust We Are Scientists though - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHfmme7iow
I think that it is the way that ‘science’ is reported that amplifies what scientists are actually claiming compared to what they seem to be claiming and yet this often masks the fact that what they are claiming is based on theory not fact!
Take the news of the ‘discovery’ of a ‘Tatooine’ like planet (Kepler 19C).
http://news.uk.msn.com/star-wars-planet-discovered
"Kepler-19C is a planet that alternately runs late and early in its orbit because a second, 'invisible' world is tugging on it. Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics said: 'This invisible planet makes itself known by its influence on the planet we can detect'."
Notice the words ‘planet we can detect’ - so far as I know the word ‘detect’ as regards extra solar system planets means inferred from perturbations in the orbit of the ‘detected’ planet’s sun (or in this case suns).
Hence we can assume that the planet makes itself known by its influence on its sun and its ‘invisible’ partner by its effect on the ‘assumed’ ’visible’ planet.
So what is the real claim? I’d say that it was that - if the present system of attributing gravitational perturbations to planets turns out to be reliable then it is possible that there is a planet which is orbiting two suns and if that is so then it is quite possible that this planet will prove to have a partner whose mass is too small to cause gravitational perturbations on the suns but appears to effect the orbit of the inferred planet.
Nice pictures though eh?
I wonder how many people realise that there is only an inferrence of this 'planet' and, so far as I know, there has never been any visual evidence of any planet beyond our Solar System.
The latest news from CERN suggests that science is set to shed the central pillar of Relativity - that nothing can exceed the speed of light.
Hopefully science will choose to get rid of all the nonsense about time travel and perhaps look again at whether neutrinos have mass.
If Relativity is fundamentally revised we might finally get some commonsense from the theoretical science fiction brigade rather than their ever more fanciful, self-indulgent musings... Don't hold your breath!
http://news.uk.msn.com/world/particle-moves-faster-than-light
“Nothing is supposed to move faster than light, at least according to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity”
“But neutrinos - one of the strangest well-known particles in physics - have now been observed smashing past this cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second.”
“Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature, starting with the special theory of relativity proposed by Einstein in 1905
Well in relation to the original question, scientists don't trust scientists here as they're asking everyone to take a look and work out if/where they went wrong.
Neutrinos do have some mass though, I think it's only light that doesn't. There's also the possibility that they're travelling through an extra dimension instead of physically moving faster than the speed of light, which would result in us getting odd numbers from the perspective of out paltry four. Which would mean that relativity isn't dead, but only correct relative to four-dimensional space. The jury's out on it all, is today's main announcement.
It's not that bad if everything gets fundamentally revised if you ask me though. cf there being more than four elements, Earth not being flat, us orbiting the sun and not vice-versa, gaffa tape being the only thing able to resist a black hole, etc...
Nicholas Schoonbeck
Oh look, a link. I wonder where it leads.
JoHn