SPQR Was it a scientist who said that the 'science is settled'? I'd be surprised if it was, because it seems to me that it is universally accepted by scientists these days, that science is an ongoing search for truths and that paradigm change is an integral part of that search.

If you have evidence that the climate scientists are not following the scientific method, then you have a case for seeing them as 'non-scientists'. Otherwise, what is the rational foundation for your belief that this area of science does not deserve the respect that science deserves?

If the current consensus about climate change is wrong, the continued application of the scientific method will reveal this to be the case. There are always young researchers who are strongly motivated to show that the establised science is wrong. I can see no evidence that this would not be the case in the climate science areas.

It seems to me to be a mistake to single out this one area of science and discredit it, and thereby the whole edifice of western science, for short term political reasons.

If the entire intellectual history of conscious man was expressed in a timeline of an hour, we have gained 99.99% of our knowledge of “things” in the dying seconds of that hour.

Previously only the physicality of cause and effect dominated our understanding of our environment. We knew that if you shot an arrow it would travel a known distance and embed, or fall to the ground when the energy was spent. But we had no concept of the forces that governed the arrow regardless of our input; we only knew what we could see, all other physics defying events we attributed to a deity, one who can defy what we knew to be fact.

Then Newton discovers gravity and that dispels the chaos theory, matter will always be governed by gravity, but later we found that we didn’t have enough gravity from the matter we could “see” to keep the galaxy in place so we employed a theoretical “no mass mass” we called Dark Matter. We can’t see it, smell it, taste it, but it is there, because a galaxies gravity is far stronger than the combined pull of all their visible stars and gas clouds so there is more mass there than we can identify. Dark Matter is a design reality, if it wasn’t there, there would be no galaxy.

All we can see and measure accounts for only about four percent of the total mass and energy in the universe, and now we have the advent of Dark Energy theory, anti gravity if you like. A force that repels rather than attracts, a Yin to Dark Matters Yang and it seems that this force works in a universe rather than galactic level. There is nothing random about existence, and the more we understand about physics the more intricate and designed the platform for existence seems to be.

Regarding gravity, don’t you just love how Jupiter's overbearing gravity shields Earth from space junk, giving us time to evolve, a bit? In fact when you look at the combination of things that had to be in place or come about for us vulnerable bags of water to survive you could almost think it was created. The Earth and we exists in this state at uncalculable odds.

Regarding the speed of light, I never really considered it to be the fastest forever amen, lots of waves travel at near that speed all day long, I never considered it an end, it is for us at this stage of evolution, but probably not tomorrow

That is excellent news stevelmeyer.Perhaps we can now travel back in time to 1913 and stop Pres Woodrow Wilson from giving the powers of money creation to the US Federal Reserve.

Mollydukes

you put it very well. Science is a constant effort to improve our understanding of the universe.

To continue the story.

Many attempts were made to tweak Newton’s laws to account for the anomalies detected in Mercury’s trajectory. That was the easy part.

The difficulty was that when you applied those tweaks to the rest of the solar system they gave the wrong answers for all the other moons and planets.

A replacement theory for Newton had to explain everything that Newton explained PLUS the anomalies in Mercury’s orbit. That was a tall order.

The genius of general relativity (GR) is that it explained everything Newtonian gravity explained and much more beside. GR and special relativity (SR) were not a mere tweaking of Newtonian dynamics. Their implications changed the way scientists thought about the world.

Now here is the thing. SR and GR make numerous very precise predictions. So far ALL these predictions have been born out by experiment.

Any replacement theory has to explain everything that SR and GR explain PLUS the apparent ability of neutrinos to exceed the speed of light. That’s a tall order which leads me to think this is probably, not certainly but probably, a false alarm.

SPQR wrote:

>>"It's just basic physics: As things travel faster they gain more mass and require more energy & so on & so on --and, anyone, who suggests otherwise shows their ignorance!">>

No.

I’m not aware of any serious scientist who has said that anyone who disputes SR “shows their ignorance.” No one is accusing the CERN researchers of “show[ing] their ignorance.”

But anyone who “suggests otherwise” without addressing the reasons why most physicists who studied the evidence concluded nothing can travel faster than light does indeed demonstrate his ignorance.

Do you understand the evidence SPQR?

Or are you just sounding off?

If true, this would revolutionise how we thought about the world. It would not mean that the laws of physics we have come to know would be wrong. They would still work in exactly the same was as they do now. Apples would still fall to Earth; homeopathy would still be impossible; carbon dioxide would still be a greenhouse gas. What it would mean is we would need a new understanding of how things work at really fast velocities or really small scales. We might get a new and better understanding of the evolution of the Universe.

My guess is an artefact. We have seen this time and time again when measurements are being made at the limit of our measuring ability. In the CERN experiments, the equipment error is about 10 ns and the difference about 60 ns.