forum for week of 26 September: skepticism

The reference of this entry is to Dr. Morton's discussion of neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy scepticism article, under the heading: 2. Two Basic forms of Philosophical Skepticism, has the inclusion ..."'possible world scepticism' because the arguments for it typically involve imagining oneself to be in some possible world that is vastly different from the actual world and at the same time absolutely indistinguishable (at least by us) from the actual world. What underlies this form of skepticism is absent to the proposition that we cannot know EI-type [Epistemically Interesting] propositions because our evidence is inadequate. In The Associated Press news release dated September 23, 2011 and titled "Physicists wary of junking light speed limit yet" a skeptic is reports Alvaro De Rujala, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired, said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error. What I find captivating is DE Rujala's choice of proposition for quotation to The Associated Press. "The average person, said De Rujala, 'could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born.'" I speculate, how much is De Rujala the skeptical physicist, who argues the average person couldn't just say hello to their future mother, as a future sibling, instead of killing their future mother, because something like quantum theory would interpret such an example as an interference and the sibling future event being altered; and, how much De Rujala's choice for The Associated Press of event as example for the average person to travel to the past, may be designed by DE Rujala to tarnish the physicists who may have successfully discovered neutrinos go faster than light--or neither of these speculations--is of great interest. James Milligan