TED Community » Sean Lindsay

More About Me

I'm passionate about

I am passionate about understanding and exploring the world with a rational mind. I am inspired to learn, apply, and teach science and appreciation of the world while nurturing personal development.

An idea worth spreading

I'll simply share one of my "Whoa, that's amazing"/tingly ideas that once crept into my head. Each and every one of us carries with us the birth of the universe. Every atom of hydrogen in our body was created in the Big Bang birth of this universe, and has been carried through the approximately 14 billion years to reside in all the water, amino acids, etc. in our bodies and that of all living things. We all carry the initial breath of the universe. While understanding the size of the universe has the immense capacity to make us feel very small in the big picture of things, realizing that I am in large part the original material of the universe provides me with a strong feeling of connectedness to, well, everything.

Talk to me about

Astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science.... science in general in all its amazing disciplines. I am fascinated with how everything connects, and strongly passionate about education.

Comments

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  A comment on Conversation: God/creation vs. big bang/evolution = no conflict!?!?!

  Nov 30 2011: I feel that I must comment on what I am seeing to be an increasing misunderstanding in the results reported recently by the Opera group. The Opera group is the collection of particle physicists that have reported they detected neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light would predict. The media, which is often woefully ignorant of the science behind a topic or what the reporting scientists are trying to communicate, latched onto the 'faster than the speed of light' portion of the scientific journal article, and neglected to mention that the scientists performing the experiment did no believe the results themselves and were asking the larger scientific world to aid them in finding the systematic error in their original experiment design. Many conjectures were put forth, one of which was easily testable at CERN, but turned out not being the source of the error in the experiment. Several other solutions exist, but it is mostly looking like error from General Relativisitic time dilation experienced by moving objects and the two location points of the particle accelerator and detector. I am not saying that this is the reason that account for the 60ns time delay, but if you plug through the equations (beyond my capability and speciality as I am not a particle physicist, but an astrophysicist), the expected correction comes out to be right around 60 ns.
  
  Also, it is important to point out that if the speed of light were not absolute, then the entire GPS network would have rapidly fallen apart as it relies upon principles of general and special relativity, which would not hold if the speed of light were not an upper limit. As GPS has been in operation for quite some time, I am suspect of any claims of particles (with mass at that) traveling at the speed of light.
  
  As another example, the speed of neutrinos has been measured to much, much higher accuracy by timing the arrival of neutrinos from Supernova 1987A, and they were not faster than c.