There is no way to validly misinterpret "has a negative mass squared" it clearly means "has the square of a negative mass" which is nonsense.
Translation: "I am ignorant of what this term means to physicists, and I declare my ignorance trumps their knowledge."
This is a scientific paper being written for the author's peers, none of whom would ever misinterpret it. I've seen this issue come up in a couple of places where laypeople are confused by the language of physics.
This is not a problem with the language of physics: it is a problem with laypeople.
I'm all for clear scientific communication, but at the end of the day, communication is hard and worrying about how some random person on the 'Net might misinterpret a term you use every day in your professional work is just not a good use of anyone's precious attention.
When I write poetry I do so in a pretty technical way. If people don't appreciate that, sucks to be them, because they are not my audience. I'm the same way in scientific communication: I write for my peers, and everyone else does the same. Let the popular science authors do the translation. They need the work.
The primary difficulty here is going to be the same data that was really tought to reconcile with in the OPERA experiment, namely the data from SN 1987A.
I had the same thought, but it turns out not to be the case. Given the model he's working with, the neutrinos will be as much above the speed of light as they would have been below it if they had the same real mass (0.3 eV or something like that.)
For ~10 MeV neutrinos this gives gamma absurdly close to unity, and it's as impossible to distinguish neutrinos traveling just over c from ones traveling at c from ones traveling just under c.
The paper actually mentions SN1987A and talks a bit about the time resolution required.
We are all essentially monkeys... blacks,white's, eskimo's and north koreans
Maybe you are; most of us are apes.
That short Wednesday is baffling. On the longer days mom and dad can maybe stagger their schedule so they can handle it if they've got flexible employers, but that 5-hour day just looks like a gift to the local after-school care programs.
Dang, I thought our school district pioneered it. They certainly are alone in our area doing it.
Yeah, it sucks. Supposedly it is to allow time for meetings, paperwork, administration, etc. That countless school districts everywhere get by without it apparently doesn't matter.
Then there's all the crazy time off
The schools want to have parent level control over the kids, but certainly don't want to actually have to watch them all day, lol.
great for the Atom Intel is using as a transitional product.
Thanks for the explanation. The purpose of the aluminium body is now fully understood.
so what is the difference if they are sitting in an office here vs. an office in Hyderabad or Bangaluru?
It's not as easy for their children to blow us up or cut off our heads?
(And no, there's nothing racial about that phrase.)
the best theory so far is that of Widom-Larsen
Widom-Larsen requires an implausible mix of scales. The effective mass of heavy electrons in the solid state is a collective phenomenon happening over distances and time-scales that are large relative to the nucleus and nuclear time-scales and affect the dynamics of the electron's interaction with the lattice, on those scales. To impute to these large-scale effects efficacy at the nuclear scale is very unlikely to be correct.
Consider a car analogy: a car moving along a freeway in dense traffic interacts with all the cars around it. If the driver accelerates, they will pull up close to the care behind and that driver may speed up a bit too, sending a diminishing wave of acceleration through the traffic, so compared to the same car alone on the road the car in dense traffic appears to have a much higher effective mass. Alone, you hit the gas and speed up a lot. In traffic, you hit the gas and speed up a little bit. That's what the electron in the surface looks like: a car in traffic.
But on the scale of car-car interactions, the "bare" mass of the car is what matters. If two cars collide you get an energy of 0.5*m*v^2, not 0.5*Meff*v^2.
Yeah, there are multi-car pileups that muddy the analogy, but they add up to nothing like the effective mass of the whole traffic block, so there. And the difference in scales between "cars and traffic" is tiny compared to the difference in scales between "nuclei and the lattice", so the effect that analogy hopefully makes obvious will be that much larger in the latter case.
One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis
