Neutrinos Beat the Theory of Relativity, and Light

Scientists at CERN in Geneva are releasing results of an experiment and are asking for scientific reviews. They've found that subatomic neutrinos may move faster than photons, which means faster than the speed of light. If all findings are accurate, this would debunk Einstein's theory of relativity claim that nothing can move faster than light.

Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds* faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. "It's a straightforward time-of-flight measurement," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. "We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school." Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.

However, even Ereditato says it's way too early to declare relativity wrong. "I would never say that," he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. "We are forced to say something," he says. "We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest." The results will be presented at a seminar tomorrow at CERN.

*60 nanoseconds = 0.00000006 seconds. Double-checking the results must be painstaking.

Link -via Discover