Friday, September 23, 2011

Cosmic speed limit broken by Neutrino


One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity – that nothing can go faster than the speed of light – has been rocked by new findings from one of the world’s foremost laboratories, CERN.
European researchers said that they clocked a sub atomic particle a neutrino going faster than the 186,282 miles per second that has long been considered the cosmic speed limit so far.
The claim was met with skepticism by other renowned physicists , with one outside physicist calling it the equivalent of saying you have a flying carpet. In fact, the researchers themselves are not ready to proclaim a discovery and are asking other physicists to independently try to verify their findings.
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which provided the particle accelerator that sent neutrinos on their breakneck 454-mile trip underground from Geneva to Italy.
CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds. A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second.
Anyhow it is necessary to conduct futher experiments to verify the findings.

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