Neutrinos Beat the Theory of Relativity, and 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
Newest 5 Comments
I find it fascinating how we still don't have the faintest clue about how the universe (and everything) actually works. Nobody can make any sense of it. For all intents and purposes we're living in a Monty Python sketch.
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It's strictly theory... And it doesn't rule out relativity, it would theoretically be an exception to the rule. The variables are practically infinite.
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Always thought Einstein chose C as the base constant because it was simply the most convenient.
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Then creationism and intelligent design are orders of magnitude more pseudoscientific.
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It is pseudoscience... anytime something is so widely believed from as little evidence as a theorists mathematical creativity its as pseudoscientific as numerology. That includes the entire field of theoretical astrophysics (it is often called a "Soft science").
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