Faster Than The Speed Of Light ?

It was more than a century ago (in 1905) that Albert Einstein introduced his famous equation Energy = Mass X Speed of Light Squared. By 1916 he had expanded this into his General Theory of Relativity. This theory said, among other things, that the speed of light was a constant (about 186,282 miles or 299,792 kilometers per second), and that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Since that time these facts have become universally accepted by scientists, and form the foundation upon which modern physics is based.

Now those facts may be called into question -- at least the part that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Scientists at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Europe say they have sent particles called neutrinos from near the Swiss-French border to Italy faster than the speed of light. Here is how the Associated Press reported it:

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.

Now 50 to 60 nanoseconds is an incredibly small period of time, and the CERN scientists have been poring over and re-calculating their figures for a couple of months. But considering that physics didn't think it was possible for anything to travel faster than light (not even by 1 nanosecond), this is huge. It would send shock waves through the entire physics community and cause them to re-evaluate nearly everything.

That is why even a couple of months later the CERN scientists are still reticent about trumpeting their findings. They want someone else to do the experiment and verify their findings, and they say at least two other facilities have the capability to do this -- Fermilab near Chicago and the T2K experiment in Japan. Hopefully, the scientists at one or both of these facilities will soon try to duplicate the CERN results.

This is some pretty exciting stuff, even for a non-science political nerd like myself. I look forward to hearing from Chicago or Japan on this in a few months.

NOTE -- The picture above is of a segment of the CERN Large Hadron Collider.