"Settled" Science

Last night via Twitter, I was alerted to today's Washington Post column by Charles Krauthammer, "Gone in 60 nanoseconds".

Mr. Krauthammer calls to attention a surely under-reported story: "Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light." (Italics in original)

What? Now, I have to say that I'm skeptical about the claim - as are most theoretical physicists. Experimentation validating Einstein's theory of relativity are numerous and easily understandable, but could it really be that Einstein was wrong about the speed of light being an absolute maximum?

Of course it could be. Scientific advances are often produced by completely unexpected observations and evidence. I really think this is a big deal, for as Mr. Krauthammer points out:

It cannot be. Yet, this is not a couple of guys in a garage peddling cold fusion. This is no crank wheeling a perpetual motion machine into the patent office. These are the best researchers in the world using the finest measuring instruments, having subjected their data to the highest levels of scrutiny, including six months of cross-checking by 160 scientists from 11 countries.

Many other researchers are attempting to duplicate CERN's experiment to either confirm or invalidate the astonishing result.

Now, if true, does this change everything? Well...no, not really. Newtonian physics aren't invalid, they just can't explain everything. Einstein's theories are just that - theories. Do they explain a lot? Yes, as experimentation has verified. Do they explain everything? Hardly.

Reading about this development reminded me of a quote I attribute to the great astrophysicist Carl Sagan. I've been unable to find an Internet attribution for this, so apologies in advance if I've gotten the speaker/author wrong. I'll paraphrase it like this:

Let us say that we conclusively determine that there is life elsewhere in the universe. Wouldn't that be the most amazing discovery ever? Conversely, let's say that we conclusively determine that there is only life in the universe on Earth. Wouldn't that be the most amazing discovery ever?

The science-as-religion crowd passionately wants us to believe that science can explain everything, while really they place theory - whether backed by "conclusive" research or not - in the place of fact.

So, consider that, and the possibility that something can exceed the speed of light, the next time you hear someone saying that the science on anthropogenic climate change is "settled". I believe we understand far less about our universe then scientists would like to assert.

Postscript: The US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, "Fermilab", outside Chicago is one of the experimental organizations trying to reproduce CERN's experiment. Fermilab just retired what had been the most powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron, on September 30th. Tevatron has been supplanted by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which American physicists have contributed to and will conduct research on. What is Fermilab planning to do next? Project X. No, I am not starting some sort of government/science conspiracy theory, but as a fan of Atlas Shrugged, the name did sort of jump off the web page at me! ;-)