When the news broke recently that a ghostly particle had reportedly smashed the speed of light record by a huge 60nanoseconds over 455 miles, my scientific smugness degenerated to near tree worship. If you cannot trust the speed of light as a constant, then hug weeping willows.
The mischief-maker was the neutrino, a sub-particle produced by smashing atoms. Together. When the CERN lab research hit the media it gave scientific pundits the chance to upstage the economic/ political gloom-and-doom prophets.
GOOD!
This can either result in a serious paradigm shift in physics (unlikely), or a damp squib that will squeeze chuckles out of less serious academics. Remember, science is as fallible to convenient misrepresentation as any other human endeavour.
A paradigm means a major shift in thinking; something like the wheel replacing the sled. It does happen, and here is one case in point.
SOLAR REVOLUTION
Ptolemy's model of the solar system had the motionless Earth at the centre of the orbiting planets and the Sun: how could the gods allow otherwise. Then 1,400 years later, Copernicus, with his heliocentric view, reduced Earth to puppy status, with the Sun as top dog. Nevertheless, they still traversed circular paths to preserve the heavenly concept of pure shape. Then Kepler devised a formula that eliminated observational anomalies and described a more realistic orbit: the ellipse.
Galileo entered the cosmic maelstrom by declaring his support for Copernicus but, forced to recant his heretical views, was put under house arrest for life; a fitting penance for someone prone to studying the stars. Nowadays, declaring everything orbits the earth would be a Flat Earth Society candidate.
It was Isaac-my-boy Newton who topped the solar paradigm when he explained that gravity was the force that kept the planets orbiting the sun (and our feet on the ground). So end of story. Well, no; in fact, definitely NO!
RELATIVELY SPEAKING
Albert Einstein - he with the becoming shock of hair - made his paradigm entrance in the early 20th century with his two shocking Theories of Relativity. So here goes:
Shock 1: Mass and energy are basically the same...Huh! I'm lean, but lazy.
Shock 2: Everything is relative... Well? So is my Mother-in-Law.
Shock 3: Think not of space and time, but space-time. ..What? Like 'fish-chips'?
Shock 4: Moving clocks run slower... Big deal! So do my racehorses.
Shock 6: Nothing travels faster than light... Except, maybe, neutrinos - and rumours?
And finally, Richter 7 Shock 6: Gravity is the result of travelling in curved space.
Curved space! Like a marble rolling down a stretched rubber sheet when a bowling ball is placed in the middle?
Was Albert E 'an 'Alice in Wonderland' fan?
QUANTUM THEORY
This king (or queen) of all paradigms will be presented as a quick and simple shopping list: particles behave as waves - cannot be fully pinpointed - improbably tunnel through mountains - subject to chance, rather than certainty (a roulette wheel existence) - their virtual cousins continuously pop in and out of the vacuum in the blink of a photon.
So where do these virtual pop-ups disappear?
Sadly, against all intuition, it works; T.V's and computers, for example.
DAMP SQUIBS
Professor Fred Hoyle promoted his Steady State theory against the rivalling Expanding Universe. It turned into a squib when the microwave background was detected emanating from the Big Bang birth, and whose name he disparagingly coined during a radio programme.
A less major blip, but with extraterrestrial implications was when In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli noted straight channels from moon drawings, which he called 'canalis'. The word was mistranslated as 'canals' which, despite his protestations, triggered the beginning of the extraterrestrial cracker.
EXTRATERRESTRIALS
This sparkler has yet to spark, notwithstanding intensive research and monitoring devices that scan the cosmos. One plus is writer H.G. Wells' eponymous 'War of the Worlds', where little green Martians in spider-like meal robots clank over the world's surface in search of conquest. He gained a science degree at a later stage in life.
"Oh," I hear you say (though I don't), "In what?"
In Zoology; this should please animal lovers and followers of Spiderman. He was also quite a philanderer, despite bristly moustache and receding hair. Psychic phenomena were another of his quirky hobbies. So we talk about a man who wrote about extraterrestrials, consorted with female human terrestrials and spent his spare time trying to contact dead ones.
Ah well! That's life, whether you're scientist, writer - or speed merchant.
Lastly, the proposed particle, the tachyon, (still theoretical; not proven) is predicted to travel above the speed of light and has huge difficulties decelerating to that magic speed constant (give or take 60 nanoseconds.)
Ah well! That's life, whether you're scientist, writer - or speed merchant
I bid you farewell; I have to rehearse the role of the Mad Hatter