The hottest news currently in world of science - Physicists show that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. It is quite unbelievable that the most basic assumption of Einstein's highly successful theory of relativity (that nothing that travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum) is questioned by an accidental discovery at a neutrino detector located underground in Italy! This discovery has definitely caught the attention of the entire scientific community and the news has spread far and wide even amongst the non-scientific community. The last time this happened was when the popular media scared the common public by wrongly promoting the idea of the possibility of black holes being created at the LHC and destroying our planet. Unlike last time I am happy that this news is spreading.
So this is how the story behind the neutrino experiment goes. Physicists at the OPERA experiment measured the decay of muon neutrino into tau neutrino by firing neutrinos from CERN, near Geneva and detecting them near Gran Sasso in Italy. The distance between the source and the detector is about 730 kilometers. When the scientists calculated the time taken for the neutrinos to travel this distance, they found that the neutrinos reached 60ns before the a beam a light traveled the same distance. The experiment was performed by measuring the distance between the source and the detector using GPS satellites which are more sensitive than the ones used by the military (with an uncertainty of 20cm) and the time of flight was measured using precisely calibrated atomic clocks (with an uncertainty of 1ns). The experimenters are confident as the results are well outside the standard error of measurement.
So this is how the story behind the neutrino experiment goes. Physicists at the OPERA experiment measured the decay of muon neutrino into tau neutrino by firing neutrinos from CERN, near Geneva and detecting them near Gran Sasso in Italy. The distance between the source and the detector is about 730 kilometers. When the scientists calculated the time taken for the neutrinos to travel this distance, they found that the neutrinos reached 60ns before the a beam a light traveled the same distance. The experiment was performed by measuring the distance between the source and the detector using GPS satellites which are more sensitive than the ones used by the military (with an uncertainty of 20cm) and the time of flight was measured using precisely calibrated atomic clocks (with an uncertainty of 1ns). The experimenters are confident as the results are well outside the standard error of measurement.
Here is a link to this paper in arXiv.
This result is hard to believe. If this result is true then it flies in the face of Einstein's relativity, one of the foundation pillars of modern physics. Not only relativity, even Dirac's equation, the basis for quantum electrodynamics which in turn is the basis for electronics, is also dependent on the cosmic speed limit set by the speed of light. Both Quantum Mechanics (QM) and General Relativity (GR) have been tested time and again and haven't yet been proven wrong. The very GPS satellites which the researchers used in their experiments at OPERA works based on QM and GR. It is difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that the results of this experiment go against the science behind the working of the equipments that were used to measure the result.
Experiments, so far, have never shown any particles that can travel faster than the speed of light. Though some theories predict the presence of an imaginary particle called tachyon whose lowest speed is that light, no such particle has ever been detected. Not just in particle accelerators, even cosmic events have not shown any such results. If neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light then the neutrinos from the supernova SN1987A should have arrived years before the light reached us. But neutrinos arrived a few hours after the light reached us.
The result form OPERA has infuriated the physics community. Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist at the University of Surrey, has gone to the extent of vowing to eat his boxer shorts on live television if this result holds up. Many other physicists have also expressed their doubts. But some physicists are appreciative of the attitude of the researchers at OPERA. When they did not know where they were going wrong, they published their results and let others check the results.
Everyone is waiting to see where the experimenters have gone wrong. But there are a few people who are optimistic about this result. They believe that the neutrinos are taking a shortcut through a higher dimension and hence are traveling faster than light. There are not many proponents of this theory but at the moment this is as good a bet as any other explanation for this result.
These are interesting times in the world of science...
Here are a few interesting blogs on this topic - one by Sean Carroll and another by Michio Kaku
This result is hard to believe. If this result is true then it flies in the face of Einstein's relativity, one of the foundation pillars of modern physics. Not only relativity, even Dirac's equation, the basis for quantum electrodynamics which in turn is the basis for electronics, is also dependent on the cosmic speed limit set by the speed of light. Both Quantum Mechanics (QM) and General Relativity (GR) have been tested time and again and haven't yet been proven wrong. The very GPS satellites which the researchers used in their experiments at OPERA works based on QM and GR. It is difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that the results of this experiment go against the science behind the working of the equipments that were used to measure the result.
Experiments, so far, have never shown any particles that can travel faster than the speed of light. Though some theories predict the presence of an imaginary particle called tachyon whose lowest speed is that light, no such particle has ever been detected. Not just in particle accelerators, even cosmic events have not shown any such results. If neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light then the neutrinos from the supernova SN1987A should have arrived years before the light reached us. But neutrinos arrived a few hours after the light reached us.
The result form OPERA has infuriated the physics community. Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist at the University of Surrey, has gone to the extent of vowing to eat his boxer shorts on live television if this result holds up. Many other physicists have also expressed their doubts. But some physicists are appreciative of the attitude of the researchers at OPERA. When they did not know where they were going wrong, they published their results and let others check the results.
Everyone is waiting to see where the experimenters have gone wrong. But there are a few people who are optimistic about this result. They believe that the neutrinos are taking a shortcut through a higher dimension and hence are traveling faster than light. There are not many proponents of this theory but at the moment this is as good a bet as any other explanation for this result.
These are interesting times in the world of science...
Here are a few interesting blogs on this topic - one by Sean Carroll and another by Michio Kaku
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