![]() “Besides my wedding day and the birth of my kids, it would be the happiest day of my life,” says Brian Greene, the author of “ The Fabric of the Cosmos” and a theoretical physicist at Columbia University. If neutrinos violate the officially posted cosmic speed limit, the result will be the Full Employment Act for Physicists. As much as they support Einstein, they’d also love for the new finding to be true. The theorists are now knotted up with conflicting emotions. Einstein said so a century of experiments have backed him up. A team of scientists in Europe announced in September that they’d clocked tiny particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. They’ve been presented with an experimental finding that threatens to blow their vision of the universe to smithereens. "If this result at CERN is proved to be right, and particles are found to travel faster than the speed of light, then I am prepared to eat my shorts, live on TV," Jim Al-Khalili, a professor of theoretical physics at Britain's University of Surrey, declared at the time.It’s been an interesting and awkward autumn for physicists. Particles that travel faster than light would smash a hole in Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics. When the OPERA team went public with their findings, they predictably unleashed a barrage of tough questions. Strengthening this scenario, Bertolucci said on Friday "the evidence is beginning to point towards the OPERA result being an artefact of the measurement."īut he said further verifications were being made, including new experiments with particle beams in May, "to give us the final verdict." In February, CERN said that the OPERA team were verifying a cable connection and a timing instrument called an oscillator that may have flawed measurements of the neutrinos' flight time. Rubbia added: "These are difficult and sensitive measurements to make and they underline the importance of the scientific process." This is how science works," said Bertolucci. "Whatever the result, the OPERA experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny and inviting independent measurements. Knowing their findings would stir a storm, the OPERA team urged other physicists to carry out their own checks to corroborate or refute what had been seen.īut he and CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci stoutly defended the rights of scientists to make exceptional claims and to the rights of others to verify them. Instead, the particles were recorded as hitting the detectors in Italy 0.00000006 seconds sooner than expected. To do the trip, the neutrinos should have taken 0.0024 seconds. The neutrinos were timed at their departure from CERN's giant underground lab near Geneva and again, after travelling 732 km (454 miles) through the Earth's crust, at their arrival at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy. The controversy began last September, when CERN's so-called OPERA team cautiously announced that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos had travelled some six kilometres (nearly four ) per second faster than the velocity of light, described by Einstein as the maximum speed in the cosmos. Their findings "indicate the neutrinos do not exceed the speed of light," the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) said in a press release.ĬERN said last month there may have been technical hitches that had skewed the initial measurements, something that critics of the findings said they had always suspected. The new measurements were made by a team working independently from the scientists who had made the tentative but hugely controversial claim about "faster-than-light" particles.
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