Einstein’s theory says that there’s nothing in the universe that could travel faster than light. Now, CERN scientists believe this could be wrong according to their latest experiment.
The experiment timed about 16,000 neutrinos launched from CERN facilities in Geneva, travelling through Earth and arriving 2.43 milliseconds later to the subterranean facilities of Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory. There, the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (the OPERA particle detector) recorded the hits.
When scientists discovered that the particles were arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light, with only a 10 millisecond error margin — they freaked out. I don’t blame them. This is similar to someone coming to you to tell you that a new observation shows that the Earth is actually flat.
But University of Bern’s Antonio Ereditato — spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration — says that the experiment is “a straightforward time-of-flight measurement” and it was repeatable, so they couldn’t ignore it because that would be dishonest: “We are forced to say something [...]We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them.”
The news are so extraordinary that other physicists are already saying that this is impossible. Chang Kee Jung — a neutrino physicist at Stony Brook University in New York — believes it’s a systematic error. Jung’s is the spokesperson for a similar project in Japan. Indiana University’s physicist Alan Kostelecky believes that, while it may be possible that neutrinos can travel faster than light, the experiment needs to be repeated “by at least one and preferably several experiments.” [Sciencemag, Reuters]
James
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 8:29 AMThe error should be 10 NANOseconds – if it’s 10 milliseconds that’s 4 times longer than the whole experiment lol. But nonetheless very interesting stuff.
DV2
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:48 PMI wonder if these ‘journalists’ even read what they’re typing. Look at “The news are so extraordinary” FFS.
Massimo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 8:31 AMWell, what would Scottie make of this? Perhaps he thinks the experiment is warped (groan!) but by what factor? Sorry, couldn’t resist. ;-))
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 9:00 AMThis is quite exciting – but could it simply be the old thing where neutrinos travel close to light speed, and because time slows down as you approach the speed of light, it *seems* that they’re travelling faster, because their actual speed and their observed speed is different?
Man. I really hope this isn’t just seemingly superluminal, and actually IS faster than light. That would be… an amazing day for physics. Wow.
Blenny
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:44 AMThats not how it works, the idea behind relativity is that time and length will dialate so that the object appears to be going slower than light.
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:51 AMTo the thing travelling. To the observer, it would appear ftl.
Ben Farmer
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 9:55 AMNo it wouldn’t. To the outside observer it appears to travel at the usual speed, i.e. close to the speed to light. Relativity cannot make a particle appear to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
G
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 9:24 AMPeople were once shocked to find out the world is not flat. Einstein was brilliant but not infallible. Is it so impossible that the universe just doesnt have limits like a top speed.
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 10:32 AMInterestingly, people have known the earth was round for much, much, much longer than most think. Way before the middle ages and back into ancient Greece.
ut your point stands.
Mike
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 10:07 AMIndeed, quite a few predictions/theories of Einstein have been proven wrong already (google you lazy bastards), even though he was a certified genius, he was only working with the knowledge of his time.
EckyThump
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 10:43 AMAs much as this is exiting news, when I saw the headline, my first thought was faster than light communications! But if it is only 60 nanoseconds faster, then it really won’t make that much difference, if say you were on Mars! Hopefully though this is the start of a really fantastic new technology! Very fast computers et all! #]
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 10:52 AMThere’s just no pleasing you Ecky. Slightly faster than the speed of light isn’t good enough? AGH! ;)
EckyThump
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:08 AMEver since I read my first science fiction novel , I was intrigued by the issue of communications over great distances! I’m really hoping they can find ‘tachyons’ soon! Unfortunately they may just be a theoretical bit of wishful thinking. But imagine instantaneous Comms anywhere in the Solar System?
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:49 AMI’m more a fan of quantum entanglement / ansible myself. It may seem silly, but I feel that kinda thing is more believable than ftl (although after today, maybe not!).
Thing is, if these neutrinos ARE travelling faster than light, we have FTL communication already. Send a neutrino, then two, then one… binary. FTL binary.
Ooh I’m getting all excited.
EckyThump
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 1:02 PMDon’t forget to take into account Mass? I have a feeling these more exotic particles either have very little or none, hence the ability to surpass the FTL barrier! #]
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:50 PMThey have very little mass, however still mass. According to theory, anything that actually has mass cannot quite reach lightspeed. (photons having no mass, I believe?).
But yes, it seems the ‘light’ weight of these particles may have something to do with this. Also the fact that because they travel NEAR lightspeed, they can appear (from their perspective) to travel faster than it because of time dilation.
Owen
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 7:36 PMLorentz transformations tells us that as particles approach the speed of light; for the observer their length contracts towards 0 , time slows towards 0, and mass increases towards infinity. It is important to note that neutrinos are extremely weakly interacting particles, interacting only by gravity and to a lesser extent the weak nuclear force. This is evidenced by the size of neutrino event detectors such as the SuperK in Japan, the Ice Cube detector in Antarctica. Neutrino interaction events occur very rarely
Bob
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:33 AMThink travelling time. That’s the difference.
Flux
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 1:31 PMAh, but if these superluminal neutrinos are behaving tachyonically, then the less energy they have the faster above the speed of light they’ll travel. It’s weird, I know…
Bob
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:34 AMCorrection…back in time.
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:50 AMThat’s going by the theory that since time slows down as you approach the speed of light, once you reach it time would stop, and once you pass it time would move backwards, yeah?
I’ve always liked that one. But that may be out the window too. If these neutrinos *are* travelling superluminal, they obviously didn’t move back in time… unless that’s the reason they ‘seemed’ faster, because they moved back… agh!
Penmonicus
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:49 AMI know that I won’t understand the answer, but… they fired things THROUGH the Earth, and then measured when they arrived on the other side? How do they know it was the same ones?!
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:55 AMTrajectory? I’m guessing the majority of neutrinos bombarding the earth every day are coming from the Sun, and to a lesser extent, interstellar space. So they’d be coming at certain angles… but if you’re pointing your measuring device in Italy towards Switzerland, underground, the majority of extraterrestrial neutrinos wouldn’t be penetrating that far at that angle, so the one you pick up you could safely say are from Cern.
That’s just my recoking… I may be wrong?
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:55 AMAnd it’s not through the Earth to the other side, It’s only across Europe, underground. Only 700-ish km.
EckyThump
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 12:50 PMThese particle actually miss close to 100% of the particles the earth and you and I are made of! It’s those tiny fraction that do collide that they are reading! #]
Flux
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 1:28 PMIf I was a guessing man, I’d say that it was a combination of trajectory (as olearymo has said) and possibly spin-coherence. They produce a bunch of neutrinos with the same spin, and when they arrive they’re easy to pick out from the noise by the fact that they’re all spinning the same way? That’s how you’d do it with photons…
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:51 PMahhhh spin yes, I forgot about that. Easy way to discern from the random ones.
When you talk about spin I start thinking of entanglement and then I get extra nerd-cited!
MDolley
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 12:25 PMI just want to know what Sheldon makes of all this!
Lachlan
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 2:12 PM+1
Flux
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 1:24 PMI love whenever something like this comes out and non-scientists are eager to label it “undermining Einstein”, and “wrecking relativity”. Bollocks. Relativity has been tweaked and improved ever since Einstein’s original formulation of the special relativity concept, and this will simply be more empirical evidence to further refine and improve the theory. That’s how science works, we keep the stuff that yields results. Relativity is far too accurate and useful to be abandoned altogether, even if these new measurements stand up to replication and repetition. Just as Newton’s Laws continued to function after we discvered they were incomplete, so relativity will survive the news that it’s missing something.
The scientists absolutely did the right thing by announcing it, though – a whole lotta physicists are going to try and replicate the experiment now, we’ll get to the bottom of this…
Fernsie
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 1:27 PMNeutrinos can pass through pretty much anything easily as they only interact with the weak nuclear force. Passing through the earth is not a problem.
Lachlan
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 2:12 PMFYI 10 milliseconds = 10 000 000 nanoseconds
60 nano seconds quicker.
10 000 000 nanosecond error.
What?
Lachlan
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 2:14 PMThat being said.. the clocks that they use to time formula 1 cars have less than a 10 millisecond error.
I’m sure the equipment that these guys are using is far more accurate. So I assume this is just a typo. :)
olearymo
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:53 PMI think it may be. Someone earlier in the comments made a note about a unit error. (1st commenter, James)
Yani
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 7:00 PMChuck Norris would still be faster
Michael
Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 1:42 AMIf the earth is round and I live antarctic won’t everything be upside down?
Simon
Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 12:35 PMNow the NBN is obsolete. Fibre Optic “Light-Speed”… pfft. Might as well transfer data by foot in comparison to this.
david
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:32 PMI am not really a science guy, but did they say they fired things THROUGH the Earth! I should get out (or stay in) more…
LawrenceN
Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 4:19 PMThese are exciting news. At least I am sure that not very far in the future mankind can now make the journeys that Arthur Clarke referred to as “no return journeys” to the center of milky way or to another star and back in their lifetimes. At least this guarantees some hope for mankind in our quest to survive and conquer the universe.