“This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully,” said Mr. He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar results weren’t detected before, such as when an exploding star or supernova was observed in 1987. Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.Įinstein’s special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country’s devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The institute collaborated with Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN. The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.Ī similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. “We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement,” said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it “a flying carpet,” something that was too fantastic to be believable.ĬERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometres) away in Italy travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Outside scientists expressed scepticism at CERN’s claim that the neutrinos one of the strangest well-known particles in physics were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometrs per second). The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance. “It’s going to cause us problems, no doubt about that - if it’s true.” “It’s a shock,” said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately. “They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements,” he said Thursday. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery. “The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva. That’s something that according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity the famous E=mc2 equation just doesn’t happen. Scientists at the world’s largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos travelling faster than light. A fundamental pillar of physics that nothing can go faster than the speed of light appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein’s theories.
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