As part of the OPERA experiment, physicists tracked how long it takes for neutrons generated at CERN to reach a detector 730km away in Italy.
(Credit: National Institute of Nuclear Physics (ITFN) in Italy) European physicists have measured tiny particles called neutrinos moving just faster than the speed of light--only a smidgen faster, but enough to raise a serious possibility that Einstein's physics need a major overhaul. The scientists sent a beam of neutrinos from CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy, 730 kilometers (454 miles) away, in a research project called OPERA. The physicists had planned to study a rare event, the transformation of the muon variety of neutrinos into the tau variety. Instead, they found the extraordinary result that the neutrinos appeared to travel faster than the speed of light.
Under Einsteinian physics, nothing can exceed the speed of light, and so far, nothing has challenged that conclusion. At particle accelerators over the decades, subatomic particles are pushed to ever-higher speeds, but it takes ever more energy to attain each new fractional step toward the speed of light. Instead of going faster when driven with higher-energy accelerators, the particles get heavier. That phenomenon is described by Einstein's famous equation linking energy (E), mass (m), and the square of the speed of light (c): E=mc2.
Sign up here with your email