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Faster than the speed of light?


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Recently CERN (the physics organization that works with the massive Hadron particle collider/accelerator in Switzerland) released experimental data indicating that a neutrino can travel faster that the speed of light. This amazing result- if verified- would mean that Einstein's Theory of Relativity has a gaping exception. Apparently neutrinos- small neutral particles with almost zero mass- do not interact with other particles, so in the experiment they were shot through the earth to a lab in Italy 454 miles away. Defying the tenant of general relativity that states that it would take infinite energy to accelerate a particle past the speed of light, these roughly 15,000 neutrinos were clocked at two parts-per-million faster than the speed of light, which is 3E8 m/s. GPS signals and a cesium based atomic clock were used to time the neutrinos, and the distance between the two labs is known to within 20cm, so it would seem that these results are highly accurate! Although CERN is careful not to draw too many hasty conclusions from this experiment ("Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potential great impact of the results motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results."), the discovery of faster-than-light travel could be an event that completely changes physics as we know it!

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