So the big news out of CERN this afternoon is the Associated Press report that researchers have clocked a subatomic particle traveling faster than the speed of light.
They’re only reporting an overage of 60 nanoseconds (with a 10-nanosecond margin of error), but that’s still enough to send shock waves through the scientific community.Why’s this big news? Because based on everything we know about physics, faster-than-light travel should be impossible. The speed of light is the universal speed limit. Exceed that limit and violate Einstein’s special theory of relativity, altering the way we understand mass and energy in the universe. Simply put, faster-than-light particle force us to reevaluate just what we know about the cosmos.
If they actually exist, that is.
The CERN team reportedly spent months checking and re-checking their findings, but this is heavy stuff, so they plan to publish the faster-than-light-neutrino results online. This way, other physicists can confirm or refute the data through independent experiments of their own. So hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to find out if we get to keep our physics textbooks.
For now, scientists and science writers are already weighing in on Twitter. Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait predicts that it will turn out to be incorrect and to quote British science writer Oliver Morton, “superluminal neutrinos are much, much less likely than subtle systematic errors in a complex experiment the length of a country.”
So we’ll see if the CERN findings stand or fall under intense scrutiny. But even if it all turns out to be bunk, it was a pretty mind-blowing and illuminating afternoon — to imagine so much of what we think we know changing just like that.
I suppose that’s what makes science so amazing.
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