Scientists: Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Experiment Needs Do-Over
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Still unmatched. Albert Einstein in 1951. Ernst Haas/Ernst Haas/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — When scientists reported in September that they had measured subatomic neutrinos traveling faster than light, they used the word “anomaly.” The anomaly, they now concede, may have been in their own equipment — perhaps a bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer when they shot beams of neutrinos from the CERN laboratory in the Swiss Alps to a detector 450 miles away near Gran Sasso, Italy.
Last year’s experiment, done with a giant apparatus called OPERA, showed the neutrinos making the trip 60 nanoseconds faster than a light beam would. That would have been a major challenge to Einstein’s theory of relativity, which said light, moving at 186,000 miles per second, was at a sort of cosmic speed limit. Einstein’s work has proved durable over the years, which was why the neutrino experiment had the physics world talking.
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, said back on Sept. 23.
In a statement CERN said the scientists were concerned about, “the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos.”
New experiments, CERN said, are now scheduled for May.
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