Good news for Einstein's fans and bad news for people who always want to prove Einstein wrong - CERN's press release earlier today confirmed that neutrinos do not travel faster than the speed of light. Though physicists always say that a new, unexpected result is always exciting, they will be relieved that such a fundamental constant like the speed of light is not broken. Else they might have had to "relearn" all of modern physics.
Not only did OPERA, the team of physicists that measured the speed of neutrinos to be faster than the speed of light, confirm that neutrinos do obey the cosmic speed light, other teams like MINOS, ICARUS and Borexino and LVD also got the same result. But the press release does not say where the OPERA team had gone wrong previously. Could it be the infamous "loose cable" problem? We don't know yet.So there ends the story of FTL Neutrinos. The last eight months have been exciting for both theorists and experimentalists. Now everyone can go back to searching for the Higgs boson or the hypothetical Dark Matter particle. Physicists at OPERA can also go back to searching for neutrino oscillation - the process of conversion of one neutrino type into another. This was the very experiment that the OPERA team set out to perform. CERN's press release also mentions that OPERA has observed this oscillation. This is good news!
If you are interested in reading about the order of events that have unfolded since CERN's press release about FTL Neutrinos last September, click here. If you don't like reading and you still want to know about FTL Neutrinos, watch this wonderful Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate 2012, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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