By now, you've either heard from me that CERN found faster-than-light particles, heard it from the news, or just not heard about it at all (in which case, don't you dare stop reading). This finding has turned the scientific community for a loop, and no one quite knows how to react. The popular news has been reporting it as the end-all-and-be-all of physics discoveries, but that's not true at all. To be sure, the significance of this find is mind-blowing, but I'm willing to bet that reporters took the ambitions and cautions of scientists (wild things, they are) at face value, instead of looking at the facts.
You and I know better.*
Let's start from the beginning. Researchers at CERN have been working on a project called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) for about three years now. Neutrino oscillation, the phenomenon they were actually studying, involves one type of neutrino suddenly turning into another type. It's kind of a mystery how this happens, so the folks at CERN designed a little mechanism to get some data on the subject. Here's how the experiment worked:
- Protons get smashed in an underground chamber, in order to prevent atmospheric radiation from interfering
- The smaller resultant particles, mesons, are shot towards a detector. In the time between getting shot out and hitting the target, the mesons decay into neutrinos.
- The neutrinos fly through the Earth's crust, being so incredibly small, until they hit the specially designed OPERA Detector over 730 km away, at Gran Sasso Labs.
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| Here's the structure of the experiment. A huge undertaking, to be sure. |
Like I said before, this experiment has been going on almost continuously for three years now; CERN has a massive amount of data at their disposal, and some of the best scientists in the world to help analyze it. So when they announced that, instead of finding the origin of neutrino oscillation, they found neutrinos that went over light speed, it was a bit of a bittersweet shock for the scientific community: bitter because a mighty pillar of physics, Einstein's Theories of Relativity, might be wrong, but sweet because... well, CERN may be right. This would change nearly every modern physics theory in some way. It would be a grand revolution of the way physicists think about the world. So many opportunities for so many things....
But first, we have to check their findings.
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| ...too soon, seal. |
If you'd like to see the report that the team themselves gave to the scientific community, go here:
It's an incredibly detailed document, but they attempt to report any and all sources of uncertainty and error that might have gone into this experiment. I have to say... they were pretty damn accurate. What other teams will find once the dust has settled, I don't know. But whether they give it the thumbs up or not, this experiment will have a lot of people wondering what's next for the world of physics.
*Though I have to admit, it was mildly ironic that I wrote the article on Special Relativity the day of this announcement.
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What do you think about this finding? Leave a comment; I'm interested to see what you think will come from this.
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