The answer is yes, scientist found out something faster than light... the findings challenge a result reported in September that, if true, would undermine a century of physics.
The team at the INFN-Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy said they had measured faster-than-light speeds in neutrinos sent from Cern, 730km away.
Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, if you must know) is the name of a large, sophisticated instrument at Grand Sasso that can catch a tiny fraction of these elusive particles. In September its scientists announced they had measured a beam of neutrinos produced at Cern, 730km away, arriving so fast that they must have been travelling faster than the speed of light. Although this was only 60 billionths of a second quicker than light over the same distance, it was still quite an incredible result.According to our understanding of the laws of physics, nothing can exceed the speed of light, an impressive billion kilometres an hour. And in my experience, there is nothing that annoys people more about Einstein's theory of relativity (for that is where this notion originates) than its claim to this cosmic limit. Since Einstein's work in 1905, thousands of experiments have only confirmed it – and indeed much of the beautiful edifice of modern physics rests on it being correct. The crucial point is not that light is so special but rather that this speed limit is written into the fabric of space and time.
One of the first objections to the experiment to be formally published appeared just five weeks later in the journal Physical Review Letters, co-authored by Nobel prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow.
Prof Glashow and his co-author Andrew Cohen argued that particles moving faster than light should emit further particles as they travel - in the process losing energy until they slow down to light-speed.
The Icarus team already had measurements of the spread of energies in neutrinos, detected in their underground instruments at Gran Sasso.
They showed in a paper again on the Arxiv repository that the neutrino energies they measure are consistent with slower-than-light-speed travel.
With the exception of Prof Glashow's theoretical paper, none of the results by the Opera or the Icarus team has been reviewed by the scientific community and formally published.
The team at the INFN-Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy said they had measured faster-than-light speeds in neutrinos sent from Cern, 730km away.
Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, if you must know) is the name of a large, sophisticated instrument at Grand Sasso that can catch a tiny fraction of these elusive particles. In September its scientists announced they had measured a beam of neutrinos produced at Cern, 730km away, arriving so fast that they must have been travelling faster than the speed of light. Although this was only 60 billionths of a second quicker than light over the same distance, it was still quite an incredible result.According to our understanding of the laws of physics, nothing can exceed the speed of light, an impressive billion kilometres an hour. And in my experience, there is nothing that annoys people more about Einstein's theory of relativity (for that is where this notion originates) than its claim to this cosmic limit. Since Einstein's work in 1905, thousands of experiments have only confirmed it – and indeed much of the beautiful edifice of modern physics rests on it being correct. The crucial point is not that light is so special but rather that this speed limit is written into the fabric of space and time.
One of the first objections to the experiment to be formally published appeared just five weeks later in the journal Physical Review Letters, co-authored by Nobel prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow.
Prof Glashow and his co-author Andrew Cohen argued that particles moving faster than light should emit further particles as they travel - in the process losing energy until they slow down to light-speed.
The Icarus team already had measurements of the spread of energies in neutrinos, detected in their underground instruments at Gran Sasso.
They showed in a paper again on the Arxiv repository that the neutrino energies they measure are consistent with slower-than-light-speed travel.
With the exception of Prof Glashow's theoretical paper, none of the results by the Opera or the Icarus team has been reviewed by the scientific community and formally published.
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