Representatives from the OPERA collaboration spoke in a seminar at CERN today, supporting their astonishing claim that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light.
The result is conceptually simple: neutrinos travelling from a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland arrived 60 nanoseconds too early at a detector in the Gran Sasso? cavern in Italy. And it relies on three conceptually simple measurements, explained Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon: the distance between the labs, the time the neutrinos left Switzerland, and the time they arrived in Italy.
But actually measuring those times and distances to the accuracy needed to detect differences of billionths of a second (1 nanosecond = 1 billionth of a second) is no easy task.
OPERA's results will still have to be duplicated before it is accepted, and that will take at least another couple of years. To read the rest of the article, click here."For the record, I don't think their measurement will hold up. Be great if I am wrong here, but I doubt it." - Jack Sarfatti