According to Einstein's restricted theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. Up until today, that had pretty much seemed to be the case, too. Early this morning, however, researchers from the Geneva-based OPERA project announced that the results from one of their recent experiments indicate that neutrinos can in fact outrun light particles.
Neutrinos are electrically-neutral subatomic particles, with almost no mass. The OPERA project has been studying the characteristics of a neutrino beam that is generated by the CERN accelerators in Geneva, Switzerland, and detected when it arrives 730 kilometers (454 miles) to the south at an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy.
It takes photons (light particles) 2.4 milliseconds to make the trip. When neutrinos were tested, however, they reached Gran Sasso 60 nanoseconds sooner - this amounts to them traveling 20 parts per million faster than the speed of light.
The scientists are stymied by the results. "This outcome is totally unexpected," stated CERN spokesperson Antonio Ereditato. "Months of research and verifications have not been sufficient to identify an instrumental effect that could explain the result of our measurements."
If the observations are in fact accurate, the implications for the world of physics will be staggering. To that end, OPERA has submitted its data to the scientific community for evaluation, and is encouraging other groups to attempt to replicate its results.
A seminar on the findings will be webcast live today by CERN at 4:00pm CEST.
If they have the path distance down to that precision I\'d be surprised.
in the end, it equates to a 0.002% difference from the normally accepted value of c.
If it were 10% I\'d be a lot more excited.
The speed of light is thought to be an absolute limit. If their findings are in fact true it blows a hundred and six years of dogma out the window. The question becomes how much faster than light can we go, instead of how close to the speed of light can we go.
the speed of light is measured. We do our best. We don\'t have any absolute vaccums to measure light\'s speed in.
So maybe we just got the original speed wrong. I\'m not suggesting things may travel faster than light. Maybe they just got the original speed of light wrong. Or maybe they just measured this experiment wrong.
Or maybe the speed for neutrinos is 0.002% faster than for photons through space (which isn\'t an absolute vaccuum either).
Quantum entanglement supposedly is faster than light too right?
Also, ask yourself which is easier to believe: a) that one experiment could be off by 18 meters over 730 kilometers or by 0.06 microseconds time measured in different countries or b) a fundamental of modern physics that predicted thousands of experimental results over a century is plain wrong.
Surely the speed would be slower than c then?
I think the ring shaped LHC needs to be ditched in favour of an (albeit very very long) straight line LHC to be more certain of the distance actually travelled by the neutrinos.
Surely photons travel at the speed of light (by definition) - whatever it happens to be in the region in question.
Surely the \"speed of a nutrino\" is not too unlike the \"speed of a nutron\", that is it could be any arb value, depending on the speed it was accelerated to?
The only question here is if this acceleration could be sufficient to get their velocity higher than c.