So let me put my money where my mouth is: if the Cern experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV." That's possible, but it's far more likely that there is an error in the data. "If the neutrinos have broken the speed of light, it would overturn a keystone theory from the last century of physics. Professor Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey said it was most likely that something was skewing the results. "It requires a complete rewriting of our understanding of the universe." It's a very, very big deal," he said on BBC 6 Music on Friday. "If you've got something travelling faster than light, then it's the most profound discovery of the last 100 years or more in physics. At the turn of the 20th century Albert Einstein encapsulated this idea in his theory of special relativity, which proposes that the laws of physics are the same for all observers and led to the famous equation E=mc 2, indicating that mass and energy are equivalent.īrian Cox, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, urged caution.
The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second, so the neutrinos were apparently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second.Ī cornerstone of modern physics is the idea that nothing can travel faster than light does in a vacuum.
#Does anything move faster than light plus#
The journey would take a beam of light around 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the Opera experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists have calculated the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. Scientists at the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, found that neutrinos sent through the Earth to its detectors from Cern, 450 miles (730km) away in Geneva, arrived earlier than they should have. If true, the finding breaks one of the most fundamental laws of physics and raises bizarre possibilities including time travel and shortcuts via hidden extra dimensions. Scientists around the world reacted with shock yesterday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light.
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