Link blog: eliezer-yudkowsky, razor, ockham, occam

julies blog: My Star Trek Quiet Book

I wasn’t familiar with the term “quiet book” before, but this is excellent.
(tags: startrek craft book)

Ockham chooses a razor

Tee hee.
(tags: ockham occam razor philosophy cartoon funny)

Eliezer Yudkowsky offers odds of 99 to 1 against faster than light information propagation

“I’ll take bets at 99-to-1 odds against any information propagating faster than c… I will not accept more than $20,000 total of such bets.” Yudkowsky taking that xkcd cartoon literally.
(tags: physics eliezer-yudkowsky light ftl neutrino cern)

1 Comment on "Link blog: eliezer-yudkowsky, razor, ockham, occam"


  1. As an undergraduate we had to check the SN1987 results which demonstrated that neutrinos travel very close to the speed of light, if neutrinos are as fast as Opera claims then the SN1987 neutrinos would have arrived years before the photons rather than hours.

    SN1987, 168k light years away went supernova, the neutrinos arrived about three hours before the photons. The explanation is that the neutrinos penetrated the big exploding gas cloud immediately whereas the photons had to bounce their way through it. However, it suggests very strongly that photons & neutrinos travel at the same velocity to one part in 500,000. The OPERA experiment has the neutrinos travelling faster by one part in 40,000. Either way the OPERA neutrinos didn’t travel at the same speed as the supernova neutrinos, if the SN1987 ones were the same speed they’d have arrived about four years before the photons.

    I’ve got much more faith in the results from SN1987 – I can easily believe a 60ns cockup, a four year cockup is a bit more unlikely.

    Reply

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