(Thousands are traversing your body as you read this.) But that is simplicity itself compared with quantum mechanics, whose random arbitrariness so offended Einstein that he famously objected that God does not play dice with the universe.Īphorisms don’t trump reality, however. Neutrinos themselves are ghostly particles that travel through nearly everything unimpeded. Not that there aren’t already mysteries in physics. Natural laws don’t just expire between shifts at McDonald’s. It’s as if someone told you that yesterday at drive time Topeka was released from Earth’s gravity. To oversimplify grossly: If the Gran Sasso scientists had a plate to record the arrival of the neutrinos and a superpowerful telescope to peer (through the Alps!) directly into the lab in Geneva from which they were being fired, the Gran Sasso guys would have “heard” the neutrinos clanging against the plate before they observed the Geneva guys squeeze the trigger on the neutrino gun. And nothing ever has – until two weeks ago, Thursday. As velocity increases, mass approaches infinity and time slows to zero, making it progressively and, ultimately, infinitely difficult to achieve light speed which is why nothing does. Einstein’s predictions about how time slows and mass increases as one approaches the speed of light have been verified by a mountain of experimental evidence. The fundamental axiom of Einstein’s theory of relativity is the absolute prohibition on speed faster than light. It has to be impossible because, if not, everything we know about the universe is wrong. Something must have been wrong to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.Īnd that’s the problem. The implications of such a discovery are so mind boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Or so they have concluded after checking for every possible artifact and experimental error. Neutrinos fired 454 miles from a supercollider outside Geneva to an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy, took less time (60 nanoseconds less) than light to get there. Scientists at CERN (the European high-energy physics consortium) have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light. I am talking about something far more important which is why it only made the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all.
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