FASTER THAN LIGHT? OR JUST TOO HARD TO MEASURE?

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There was an earthquake this week. Not a real one, but a piece of news that shook the world of physics. A team of scientists claimed to have measured some particles moving faster than the speed of light.

The experiment involved a beam of neutrinos sent from a giant particle accelerator, the Super Proton Synchotron, at the facilities of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to a special neutrino detector under Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, 730 kilometers away. What shocked the researchers was that the neutrinos appeared to arrive at the detector 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have if they’d been travelling at the speed of light. Now, 60 billionths of a second may not seem like much, but Einstein’s theories of relativity say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So, if true, this experiment might not only prove the great Einstein wrong, but even force a significant shift in thinking about the laws of the universe.

Maybe that’s why so many reputable scientists don’t believe it.

There’s been endless speculation since the result was announced, including a lot of criticism that the findings should not have been announced until they’d been properly verified and duplicated. Even though the experiments took place over three years and the experimental data is rated as having a very high degree of reliability, most don’t believe it. They think there’s been an error somewhere. The results contradict earlier measurements involving neutrinos, including neutrinos from supernovae which were not found to have outraced the photons from the star explosions. And, after all, neutrinos are notoriously hard to measure. Besides, most scientists would rather bet on Einstein than some upstarts, even if they do have a particle accelerator.

But most importantly, there’s a lot at stake here. Relativity would have to be scrapped or seriously rejigged, and even causality—the law of cause and effect—would be on the trash heap. Then where will we be?

If my computer starts submitting posts before I even hit the ENTER key, who knows how much trouble I could get myself into?

ARE WE ALONE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD?

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We look up at the stars and wonder if we humans are alone in this vast universe. It’s not a question we can answer yet (unless you’re a true believer in UFOs), but there sure are a lot of people working to estimate how much galactic real estate might support life.

Our Milky Way galaxy alone is thought to include 200 billion stars—maybe many more than that, and at least tens of billions of those are yellow-orange stars similar to our sun. But until the last 20 years or so, we really had no way to know if many of those stars had planets orbiting them. If we’re hoping to find life, the first step is to not only find planets, but planets in the habitable zone of their stars: the so-called Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold. There are other considerations, like gravity and atmosphere, but even just finding rocky planets the right distance from their sun is a good start.

Since 2009 the Kepler spacecraft has been monitoring the brightness of more than 145,000 stars. Why? Because if a planet crosses in front of the star (between it and Earth) the light will dim just a tiny bit. Kepler can measure that. Another astonishing instrument called High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in an observatory in Chile uses a high-precision spectrograph to also measure light, but in such a way as to detect motion. A planet orbiting a star will cause a tiny wobble in the star that HARPS can see. The Keck Observatory in Hawaii has been using a similar method to great effect for a couple of decades now. There are other efforts underway in the UK, Spain and elsewhere.

So with all this searching going on, how many planets have scientists really discovered around other stars? The number is approaching 700, and might even be higher than that by the time you read this. More than 1200 other possible candidates have been identified and are just waiting to be confirmed. Admittedly many of those are probably gas giants like Jupiter, but many are also smaller than Neptune and might be much closer to Earth in size and composition. But it’s the ones that appear to be in the habitable zone of their star that grab headlines. That number is still small, but growing. And even if only a small percentage of sun-like stars have a habitable planet, in a place as big as the Milky Way that still means potentially tens of millions of planets where life similar to Earth’s could exist.

It’s still not proof, but it sure does improve the odds. So if you’re getting tired of the Caribbean or Europe, have we got a long distance vacation destination for you!

SUMMER'S END

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It’s been an interesting summer, and a fruitful one. For me, the biggest news was the acceptance of my first novel, Dead Air, to be published by Scrivener Press in the fall of 2012. That’s been a long time coming. It follows a radio morning show host who finds himself the victim of harassment that escalates into attempts on his life.

But the news has been good on the short story front, too, with a couple more stories available or soon to be available in print. My story “Shakedown” appears in the anthology Canadian Tales of the Fantastic from Red Tuque Books, which can now be ordered through Amazon.ca . It’s a story about a prototype submersible the size of a virus, designed to travel the human bloodstream (yes, inspired by the movie Fantastic Voyage) except the virtual reality control system takes a terrible toll on the test pilot. “Shakedown” is a prequel to my novel Labyrinth which continues the story of the submersible Primus, and is currently looking for an agent and publisher. Here’s the anthology’s cover art to look for.

 

My story “Once Upon A Midnight”, about the disastrous consequences of a woman’s failing marriage, was previously made available on this site but has since been removed because it’s going to be included in the forthcoming anthology In Poe’s Shadow from Dark Opus Press. I still don’t have a publication date for that one, but I just approved the galley proof for the story and it looks good—a nice gothic font for titles etc. The cover art is interesting too. I’m eager to have a good look at both anthologies in print.

A couple of other stories have reached the final stages of the selection process on other fronts, so my fingers are crossed for those. Now, as I resign myself to the fact that the days will be getting cooler, I’m hoping that the writing career stays hot!