Neutrinos that appear to travel faster than light!
European physicists have measured the speed of subatomic particles called neutrinos that are moving just a “smidgen” faster than the speed of light, the famous “c” in Einstein‘s famous equation, E=mc². The “kicker?” Under Einsteinian physics, nothing can exceed the speed of light!
In project OPERA, the physicists sent a beam of neutrinos from CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy, 730 kilometers (454 miles) away. The physicists had PLANNED to study the transformation of neutrinos of the muon variety into neutrinos of the tau variety, a rare event! (Those of us who KNOW physicists, know that some of them “get their jollies” in weird ways! 😉 )
INSTEAD, the scientists found that the EXTRAORDINARY and unexpected result that the neutrinos appeared to travel FASTER than the speed of light!
Over the last three years, the OPERA experiment has gathered data about the journey of the neutrinos, which SHOULD take about 2.4 thousandths of a second. Instead, the neutrinos arrived about 61 billionths of a second sooner than would light traveling in a vacuum, where its speed would be maximum!
As is typical with scientists, the human emotional reaction was quickly followed by the disclaimer:
“This result comes as a complete surprise,” said Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for OPERA and a professor a the University of Bern, in a statement.
But he didn’t dwell on the research’s implications: “The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations.”
Now it is time for OTHER scientists to look at whether the results can be reproduced, that is “Are the results correct or wrong?”
(Do you see why I love science? ALMOST NOBODY would subject statements by Congress or large corporations to such scrutiny! 
)
The researchers will detail their results at CERN, and they have published the paper (PDF) at Arxiv, a site for research that has not yet passed the peer-review scrutiny required for publication in academic journals.
“After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation,” Ereditato said.
Given the potential impact of the results, much of the scientific paper is focused on exactly HOW the “flight time” of the neutrinos was calculated. Using GPS measurements and atomic clocks, the distance from source to destination was measured with an accuracy of 20 cm. The scientists found that the neutrinos arrived 60.7 nanoseconds faster than light in a vacuum would have, “…with a statistical uncertainty of only plus or minus 6.9 nanoseconds and measurement uncertainty of plus or minus 7.4 nanoseconds.”
The scientists know that their work is not over with regard to convincing the world that Einstein’s supposedly unbreakable law has been broken. Much of Einstein’s work has withstood the test of time.
“Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly,” the paper concludes. “We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results.”
-Bill at
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