European physicists have measured tiny particles called neutrinos moving just faster than the speed of light--only a smidgen faster, but enough to raise a serious possibility that Einstein's physics need a major overhaul.
The scientists sent a beam of neutrinos from CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy, 730 kilometers (454 miles) away, in a research project called OPERA. The physicists had planned to study a rare event, the transformation of the muon variety of neutrinos into the tau variety. Instead, they found the extraordinary result that the neutrinos appeared to travel faster than the speed of light.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Physics shocker! Neutrinos clocked faster than light
via news.cnet.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment