Faster-than-light measurement shocks physicists

GENEVA - Physicists on the team that measured particles traveling faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.

Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world's foremost laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle, the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of Albert Einstein.

"To our great surprise we found an anomaly," said Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team.

An anomaly is a mild way of putting it.

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Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen, according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

The team — a collaboration between France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory — fired a neutrino beam 454 miles underground from Geneva to Italy.

They found it traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That's sixty billionth of a second, a time no human brain could register.

"You could say it's peanuts, but it's not. It's something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty," Ereditato told The Associated Press.

If the experiment is independently repeated — most likely by teams in the United States or Japan — then it would require a fundamental rethink of modern physics.

"Everybody knows that the speed limit is c, the speed of light. And if you find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us," said Ereditato, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Physicists not involved in the experiment have been understandably skeptical.

Alvaro De Rujula, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired, said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error.

If not, and it's a big if, the door would be opened to some wild possibilities.

The average person, said De Rujula, "could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born."

But Ereditato and his team are wary of letting such science fiction story lines keep them up at night.

"We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation," he told the AP. "Everybody is free to do what they want: to think, to claim, to dream."

He added: "I'm not going to tell you my dreams."

[se7ensnakes]

My Thought: There is a difference between what we observe and measure and reality. The fact is that THOUGHT is a process, and that process has an effect on how we view reality. Trying to understand the universe without metaphysics is discounting the tools that we use to investigate and obtain data. In physics there is an assumption made. and that assumption is our thought process. Thoughts have certain characteristics that may alter reality. For example when we recognize something...anything we need to compare to understand it. We are not capable of thinking independently, everything is dependent. This is a mighty curious phenomena.

[aborwick]

Perhaps the speed of light needs to be adjusted, not the theory of relativity.

[Death_Be_Not_Proud]

Hey Airwick...go back to school.

[Eric Bittner]

Sorry, but in vacuum, the speed of light is the same for all frequencies. That's why it's a constant.

[goffredo29]

Or do they mean faster than the speed of VISIBLE light? Because, say, the speed of ultraviolet light is faster than the speed of visible light. On a related note, we still have Einstein's brain, so, let's ask it. Or, how many people out there know that comedian Albert Brooks' real name IS Albert Einstein? Let's ask him.

[Death_Be_Not_Proud]

Lay off the Shrooms!

[Lindag10]

Big deal they've been traveling faster than light on Star Trek for years. What we really need is one of those machines that we can order whatever we want to eat (fully prepared) from and it just appears nicely served in an appropriate container or dish.

[CloudgenWong]

Since neutrino does not process any electric field and magnetic field, the speed of neutrino is a good hints of speed of gravity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity

I have set up a facebook page to record the progress of measuring the speed of change gravity field hoping our scientists can find more clue about that. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Speed-of-Gravity/200134420056447

[Overruled1]

Warp 10 is possible.

[smurfula]

Yup, I am a retired construction worker, and this news really shocked me when I heard about it, TWENTY TO THIRTY years ago. This is old, worn out news.

[askagain]

Even if Einstein's Theory of Relativity is proven wrong (whatever that means), it is amazing that it has held-up since 1905. Einstein put forth that theory 105 years ago, long before televisions, computers, VCRs, lasers, cell phones, or the internet.

[doctor_know]

It's always improving.... Newtons theory of gravity held up for 200 years before Einstein. But this may prove to be an error still.

[lloydbest1]

Human or instrument error probably. 6 parts in a hundred million isn't exactly earth shaking. it's also possible all they did was remeasure "C" more accurately. If they did, that has value in itself.