To the astonishment of the OPERA team, the particles appear to have reached their destination about 60 nanoseconds faster than expected.Ī nanosecond may not sound like much, but "the effect is quite large," said Fermilab's Parke, who was not part of the CERN team.
#NEUTRINOS FASTER THAN LIGHT ZIP#
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that have almost no mass and can zip through entire planets as if they are not there.īeing nearly massless, neutrinos should travel at nearly the speed of light, which is approximately 186,000 miles (299,338 kilometers) a second. (See pictures of a neutrino detector 1.5 miles under Antarctic ice.) The team shot neutrinos out of a particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, and measured how long it took the particles to travel to a neutrino detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, 450 miles (724 kilometers) away. Members of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) described the unusual neutrino detection in a paper published this week on the research website. "If that happens, the concept of causality becomes ambiguous, and that would cause a great deal of trouble."
"If things travel faster than the speed of light, A can cause B, B can also cause A," Parke said. The existence of faster-than-light particles would also wreak havoc on scientific theories of cause and effect. (Related: "Proton Smaller Than Thought-May Rewrite Laws of Physics.") government-run Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois. So if this is true, it would rock the foundations of physics," said Stephen Parke, head of the theoretical physics department at the U.S. "Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. If confirmed, the astonishing claim would upend a cardinal rule of physics established by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago. Neutrinos-ghostly subatomic particles- may have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light, scientists announced this week.
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