Even though they took great pains to measure the times as well as they could, I think that’s the weak point of their experiment. Measuring those two times is a bit tricky, however. The difference between those two times tells them how long it took for the neutrinos to travel from source to detector, which then allows them to determine their speed. After all, if the scientists are going to measure the velocity of the neutrinos, they need to know when the neutrinos are made and when they reach the detector. Most importantly, they seem to have taken great care in keeping track of time in their experiment. The scientists have published an initial version of their paper, and it is impressive. It sits 730 kilometers away from the source of the neutrinos it is detecting, and those neutrinos generally take about three thousandths of a second to travel from the source to the detector. In this experiment, the neutrinos are detected by an underground system called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), which is made up of about 150,000 bricks of photographic emulsion film stacked in between lead plates. That’s probably the most overlooked part of the story!įirst, you need to know that the particles being studied are called neutrinos, and they are maddeningly hard to detect, because they don’t interact strongly with matter. Even if they are confirmed, however, they don’t necessarily mean that special relativity is incorrect. These results need to be confirmed, and I am rather skeptical that they will be. However, the first part of that previous statement is really, really important. If this observation is confirmed, it could deal a severe blow to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which has an enormous amount of experimental confirmation. The OPERA detector at CERN (click for credit)The science media is abuzz with claims that scientists at the world’s largest particle physics lab (CERN) have observed subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light.
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