22
2011
CERN: Speed Of Light Barrier Broken By Neutrinos!
An article by 
You know that guy with the weird hairdo, Albert Einstein, who gave the two theories of relativity? The Special Theory and the General Theory?
When he said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light because it’s a cosmic constant?
All the stuff we have been taught from school days to university life?
The physics research of more than a hundred years and all the hard work based on these theories?
Yeah, all that.
It all might go down the drain like a load of crap.
Scientists at the large hadron collider, belonging to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), have claimed that they have found particles which exceeded the speed of light.
Sorry Einstein bro, no hard feelings!
The speed of light has been considered the maximum speed limit of anything in the universe. Even though many experiments have been performed to measure it more and more accurately, yet nothing has ever broken this barrier.
Well…uptil now, that is.
Sixteen thousand neutrinos were launched from the CERN facilities in Geneva, Switzerland and they arrived in Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory some 2.43 ms (milliseconds) later. That’s about sixty nanoseconds faster than light!
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the one-sixty member strong team of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) project said that measurements taken over three years have found neutrinos arriving at the crime scene sixty nanoseconds earlier than light would, with an error margin of only ten nanoseconds.
Naturally, the reaction to this was a widespread scientist freak-out. The OPERA team are so shocked that they want others to verify what their own eyes have seen.
Other scientists have gone to lengths to deny it outright, claiming that this is not possible. They have termed this as a systematic error. (I believe the world should learn now that outsourcing is not always the right way to do it.)
BUT!
If the results turn out to be right, we might very well start our research again from the Stone Age. Okay, I went a bit too far with that but nevertheless, it will destroy what mankind has learned in the past hundred years. Who knows, it might even provide a better understanding of all the matter around us and we might have a clearer view of it all.
So, let’s keep our fingers crossed for the better of mankind…
…and Einstein, if you’re an e=mc^2 freak.
Some awesome pictures of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider right here.
Ummm...sharing is good, right? :)
About the Author: SAWJ
SAWJ is an Electrical Engineer from Pakistan. Not just that, he loves to code as well. There are three things he cannot live without: his laptop, his smartphone and the internet. Follow him on Twitter here: Senilius_110.
