CERN’s Mea Culpa: Einstein Was Right, Neutrinos Do Obey the Speed of Light
Looks like Einstein was right after all. Neutrinos do obey the limits of the speed of light.
The new findings bring closure to CERN’s previous and now discredited discovery. The news caused quite the stir last September when a CERN experiment claimed to have caught neutrinos breaking the universe’s most fundamental speed limit. The neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have if they had been travelling at the speed of light, the team said at the time. The subatomic particles appeared to have traveled faster than light from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to a detector in Italy. Since the news broke, scientists around the globe have been trying to explain how the neutrinos broke one of the fundamental laws of physics.
Last year, Forbes contributor Tim Worstall put the discovery into perspective writing in a post, “Faster than light (FTL) travel for a particle with a rest mass of greater than zero would certainly be interesting if it existed. For a start, it would be the basis of faster than light travel itself: soaring off around the universe type stuff. However, that also means, inevitably, time travel. If you can travel faster than light then you are doing time travel in fact.”
Yes, this would have been interesting, but alas, this is not the case.
Frank says: