No experiment had seen anything moving faster than light, which zips along at 186,000 miles per second. Particles traveling at speeds up to 99.99 the speed of light in the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland experience the same kind of relativity-induced. The OPERA team is discussing more cross-checks, he added, including possibly running a fiber the 454 miles between the sites.įor more than a century, the speed of light has been locked in as the universe’s ultimate speed limit. “One of the eventual systematic errors is now out of the way,” said Jacques Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics in France, in a statement.īut the faster-than-light drama is far from over, Martino added. The detector still saw neutrinos moving faster than light. Such tightening removed some uncertainty in the neutrinos’ speed. So in recent weeks, the OPERA team tightened the packets of neutrinos that CERN sent sailing toward Italy. Among other possible errors, some suggested that the neutrinos generated at CERN were smeared into bunches too wide to measure precisely. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research.Ī chorus of critiques from physicists soon followed. In the first round of experiments, a massive detector buried in a mountain in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded neutrinos generated at the CERN particle accelerator on the French-Swiss border arriving 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected. Should the results stand, they would upend more than a century of modern physics. There is still a large crowd of skeptical physicists who suspect that the original measurement done in September was an error. That is, more tests are needed, and on other experimental setups. While the second experiment “has made an important test of consistency of its result,” Ferroni added, “a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world.” Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment. The “positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result,” said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light - stunning the world of physics - has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |