**Scientific breakthrough: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than light ** Looks like Einstein may have been wrong — An international team of scientists at CERN has recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light.
According to Reuters: Antonio Ereditato, who works at the CERN particle physics center on the Franco-Swiss border, told Reuters that measurements over three years showed the neutrinos moving 60 nanoseconds quicker than light over a distance of 730 km between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy.
“We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them,” he said.
If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light.
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
I’d like to see humans travelling faster than light.. so we could travel back in time n all 
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
I wonder if this is a misreading.
Pretty amazing stuff :k:
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
So all those years of studying the basic theory of Physics, just to find out it wasn't even true sighh
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
^ mayn tu physics mayn fail bhi ho gya thha 
or wait, was it chemistry?
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^
Must be both. Add any other science subject too. Physics and Chemistry won't feel left out =p
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
Amazing discovery! Project OPERA seems like its going to change physics as we know it! CERN has given us a chance to discover lots of new things about the big bang and physics. A neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light and months were spent checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment. And now think about all the corrections we will be making in so many areas where physics is used…E=mc2 will have to change..
I have actually been to CERN in Geneva when I was in high school in Switzerland, and seen the tunnel where these accelerators are installed. Amazing to see CERN doing so much for the scientific advancement and understanding.
Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
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A meeting at Cern, the world’s largest physics lab, has addressed results that suggest subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light.
The team has published its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.
If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science will come tumbling down.
Antonio Ereditato added “words of caution” to his Cern presentation because of the “potentially great impact on physics” of the result.
The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” the report’s author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn’t.
“When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this’.”
Friday’s meeting was designed to begin this process, with hopes that other scientists will find inconsistencies in the measurements and, hopefully, repeat the experiment elsewhere.
“Despite the large [statistical] significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects,” Dr Ereditato told the meeting.
“We look forward to independent measurement from other experiments.”
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
The Cern team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, and sends them through the Earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second earlier than they would have done if they had travelled at the speed of light.
This is a tiny fractional change - just 20 parts in a million - but one that occurs consistently.
The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 16,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.
But the group understands that what are known as “systematic errors” could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit.
That has motivated them to publish their measurements.
“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved,” Dr Ereditato told BBC News.
But for now, he explained, “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy”.
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
I dont know how this observation (or fact) sits with the theory of mass increasing with velocity from the observers perspective. Did they see any increase in mass in these neutrinos?
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
may be possible to go into the future. But not the past cuz that would alter the events leading up to the present time therefore creating a time paradox
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
^We are already time traveling to the future, at the speed of 1 second per second
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^come one man i looked cool there for a second
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
on*
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
Why is the world stuck on the theory that Einstein can't be wrong?
He's not the boss of us :)
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
you are a cool person man, you are.
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
ok so what exactly are neutrinos...by their name they seem like neutral lighter behnein of neutron bhai :p
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
ok so what exactly are neutrinos...by their name they seem like neutral lighter behnein of neutron bhai :p
you cannot be more right than that. They are neutral in charge (just like neutrons) and almost no mass.
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
you cannot be more right than that. They are neutral in charge (just like neutrons) and almost no mass.
so they are probably even lighter than an electron. Thus their speed. CERN has always fascinated me. If Einstein's theory is proven false the next generation of kids is in for a whole new era of physics. :)
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
If Einstein's theory is proven false the next generation of kids is in for a whole new era of physics. :)
a rare violation of a theory does not make it obsolete. Einstein theory of gravity drastcially changed what we knew through Newtonian Physics but for our daily life, Newtonian physics is still a very good and valid tool.
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
That particle was riding on a photon.
When he jumped off it became little faster, then eventually slowed down.
Read the update.
Re: Einstein may have been wrong afterall.
Photons are very much part of the fabric of space-time whereas the neutrino seems to be unaffected by space-time ... besides the calculations of 60 nanosecs over 750 km is still very slight the assumption of "c" within the relativity equations are still a good measure of accuracy and if neutrinos don't behave like photons do anyway (i.e. light has pressure) - streams of neutrinos do not seem to exert this pressure hence they move through objects then the equations of Einstein should still be valid ...
TLK has asked the question about mass twice and no one was listening ... You see even photons have 0 mass - but only when stationary when they moving they gain momentum that cannot be said about the neutrino.