On Sept. 23, European scientists announced that they had observed neutrinos, a class of subatomic particles, traveling faster than the speed of light — the universe’s fundamental “speed limit.” The experiment, OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), was a collaboration between the Italian Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) and Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory CERN. Since the announcement of this anomaly, the scientific community has been hotly debating its validity, as well as the possibilities that could arise from such results.
MIT Physics Professor Scott A. Hughes said, “ Carl Sagan? had this saying, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is not extraordinary evidence.”
Hughes pointed out that the OPERA experiment was not originally designed for measuring the speed of neutrinos. The main goal was to transmute — or convert — one type of neutrino, called a muon neutrino, into a tau neutrino, a heavier type of particle.
Hughes conceded that the researchers “have done as good a job as they can, but this is extremely hard to measure … there’s this table of systematic errors in their measurements, and one error tends to dominate. If they combined their errors in a different way, their results could have been within the error bars.”
“I don’t think the paper is outlandish,” added Physics Professor Janet Conrad.
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