| Are Neutrinos Really Faster Than The Speed Of Light? |
Shelley Kronzek |
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| On September 23rd 2011, a team of researchers from Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey working at the CERN Physics Laboratory released the astonishing results of a three-year study on the travel behavior of neutrinos. The OPERA experiment was inaugurated in 2006 with simpler goals but the world's largest physics lab claims that they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. If true and when confirmed by other studies, Albert Einstein's claim that nothing is faster than the speed of light will be proven false. According to the CERN press release: |
| "The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15,000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature's cosmic speed limit. ... The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms. For this reason, many searches have been made for deviations from Einstein's theory of relativity, so far not finding any such evidence." |
| From a September 22nd New York Times article dedicated to the expected CERN findings: |
| "These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment," said John Ellis, a CERN theorist who has published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos. According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 0.0025 percent (2.5 parts in a hundred thousand)." |
| CERN's own neutrino specialist continues: |
| "Neutrinos are among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world. Once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light, they can sail through walls and planets like wind through a screen door. Moreover, they come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel along…" |
| The subatomic particles now known as "neutrinos" were first discovered by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. Dr. Enrico Fermi took Pauli's neutrino hypothesis and built his theory of beta decay (weak interaction). In the process he coined the name "Neutrinos". Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference: neutrinos do not carry an electric charge. Because neutrinos are electrically neutral, they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces which act on electrons. Neutrinos are affected only by a "weak" sub-atomic force of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and are therefore able to pass through great distances in matter without being affected by it. |
| John Learned, a neutrino astronomer at the University of Hawaii, noted that if the results of the OPERA researchers turned out to be true, it could be the first hint that neutrinos can take a shortcut through space. Joe Lykken of Fermilab remarked, "Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different." |
| But it is too soon for such mind-bending speculation. The OPERA group results will generate a rush of experiments aimed at confirming or repudiating it, according to Dr. Learned. "This is revolutionary and will require convincing replication," he said. |
| The OPERA results will doubtless generate a rush of experiments aimed at confirmation or repudiation. Meanwhile, the mind-bending notion of forces faster than the speed of light and their implications for time travel give us cause to pause, wonder, and reflect. Is science fiction soon to be science fact? |
| You can read more about the discover of neutrinos in these two excellent Dover books by the late George Gamow: |
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