CERN scientists say they’ve clocked subatomic neutrino particles at faster than light speeds, something Einsteinian physics just doesn’t allow.
A huge controversy is, as you’d expect, brewing over this one. Quantum labs around the world will soon be attempting to replicate the CERN experiment and timing results. Check out what CERN scientists say about the ramifications of clocking faster than the speed of light.
Video courtesy: Skynet. Scientists recently clocked subatomic neutrino particles at faster than light speeds — or did they. A big hoohah over this in physics! Source: The New York Times.
Here’s a short excerpt from a truly excellent piece in The New York Times.
Neutrinos, though ghostly in many regards — they are able to traverse planets and walls of lead like light through a window, and to shape-shift from one of three varieties of the particle to another along the way — are part of the universe, and so there was no reason to expect that Einstein’s stricture should not apply to them as well.
But over the course of the last three years, in experiments designed to investigate this shape shifting, neutrinos produced at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and beamed underground to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, an underground facility about 450 miles away, arrived about 58 billionths of a second sooner than would a light beam, according to Opera. The group is based at Gran Sasso, which is near L’Aquila; CERN is in Geneva.
When these results were presented to a meeting at CERN in September, after a prairie fire of blog rumors, they were greeted by fierce skepticism. Among the problems … read the rest of the story in The New York Times …
