MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC mAGAZiNe OF THe SOCie TY FOR SCieNCe & THe PUbLiC
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Don’t stop presses yet for
faster-than-light neutrinos
In the world of science journalism, rarely
does any news evoke the desire to scream
“Stop the presses!”
You’d need something really
special to justify such a reaction. Like
a 100-percent effective cure for cancer,
or a message from an extraterrestrial,
or an experiment clocking a subatomic
particle exceeding the speed of light.
Well, as you might have heard, just such a shocking development was claimed in September, when researchers reported
that neutrinos had traveled from CERN (near Geneva) to
Italy’s Gran Sasso underground laboratory in less time than
the same trip would take for light in a vacuum.
At light speed, neutrinos would traverse the 730-kilometer
distance in 2.44 milliseconds; after accounting for delays due
to processing the signals, the researchers calculated that the
neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds early. Einstein defied.
Unlike some previous claims for superluminal speeds,
there are no obvious mistakes or misunderstandings in this
report. The team’s paper (available online at http://arxiv.
org/abs/1109.4897) carefully assesses all the known sources
of possible errors in the analysis. For one thing, the exact
distance measured from source to detector might vary by
as much as 20 centimeters, the team acknowledges. But a
20-centimeter error would adjust the travel time by less than
a nanosecond, far too little to account for the 60-nanosecond
difference observed. Other possible sources of error add up
to 7 nanoseconds or so. Even adding another 7 for statistical
uncertainties still doesn’t substantially close the gap.
Nevertheless, few experts believe this result will hold up.
Einstein’s special relativity theory establishes the speed of
light limit as a fundamental property of the relationship
between space and time. And his theory has been tested so
thoroughly, in so many ways, for so long, that the presence of
some hidden flaw in this new experiment is much more likely
than the need for a new theory of the universe.
Consequently, no presses were stopped. And only a small
amount of space (see Page 18) was made available in this issue
(you can read a longer version online at bit.ly/nxiRS3).
But who knows? Maybe the neutrinos know something
about nature that Einstein didn’t. We’ll be watching. And if it
turns out that an explanation does emerge for the neutrino
results that confirms the refutation of relativity, it will get a
lot more coverage. — Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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