![]() Stephen Parke, head theoretician at the Fermilab, said there could be a cosmic shortcut through another dimension - physics theory is full of unseen dimensions - that allows the neutrinos to beat the speed of light. So if the neutrinos are pulling this fast one on Einstein, how can it happen? "Until this is verified by another group, it's flying carpets. "This is ridiculous what they're putting out," Baden said. Tracking neutrinos is very difficult, he said. Nevertheless, the Fermilab team, which shoots neutrinos from Chicago to Minnesota, will go back to work immediately to try to verify or knock down the new findings, Thomas said.ĭrew Baden, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland, said it is far more likely that there are measurement errors or some kind of fluke. ![]() She said Fermilab's experience showed how hard it is to measure accurately the distance, time and angles required for such a claim. The neutrino has almost no mass, it comes in three different "flavors," may have its own antiparticle and even has been seen shifting from one flavor to another while shooting out from the sun, said physicist Phillip Schewe, communications director at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland.įermilab team spokeswoman Jenny Thomas, a physics professor at the University College of London, said there must be a "more mundane explanation" for the European findings. These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years. If anything is going to throw a cosmic twist into Einstein's theories, it's not surprising that it's the strange particles known as neutrinos. But that experiment had such a large margin of error that it undercut its scientific significance. Given the enormous implications of the find, they spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.Ī team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. "It has worked perfectly up until now." And part of that theory is that nothing is faster than the speed of light.ĬERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. That will be necessary, because Einstein's special relativity theory underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that "they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail." France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research collaborated with Italy's Ran Sass National Laboratory for the experiment, which has no connection to the atomic-smashing Large Hadron Collider, which is also located at CERN. "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN.ĬERN provided the particle accelerator to send neutrinos on a breakneck 454-mile (730-kilometer) trip underground from Geneva to Italy. The claim is being greeted with skepticism inside and outside the European lab. ![]() "We'd be thrilled if it's right because we love something that shakes the foundation of what we believe," said famed Columbia University physicist Brian Greene. The speed of light - 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) - has long been considered a cosmic speed limit. Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity - the one made famous by the equation E equals mc2. Einstein has been tested repeatedly over and over again." Plunkett said he is keeping an open mind on whether Einstein's theories need an update, but he added: "It's dangerous to lay odds against Einstein. "Everybody is going to be looking at every piece of information." "This thing is so important many of the normal scientific rivalries fall by the wayside," said Plunkett, a spokesman for the Fermilab team's experiments.
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