The detector weighs a total of 1300 tonnes.ĭespite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato's team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong. The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 "bricks" of photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. If we do not have causality, we are buggered." "Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. The key point underlying causality is that the laws of physics as we know them dictate that information cannot be communicated faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, added Sarkar. "The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect." Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: "If this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments. "If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out." We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors. "When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn't think of. ![]() Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result.Īntonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the Guardian: "We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it. The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. ![]() Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second. The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab. They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern – the European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper ( pdf) describing the experiment. Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.
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