On The Superluminal Neutrino

Two days ago, a team of experimentalists at CERN published the results of their OPERA experiment.

It seems a bunch of subatomic particles are traveling faster than the speed of light. You can read their arvix paper here.

Let’s get one thing straight. Modern physics -and when we say modern we are really talking about everything that was built since Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis- holds the speed of light as the one and only constant in the universe. It is actually not a speed in the classical sense of the term; it’s more of a conversion factor between time and space, where one unit of time equals one unit of space. The fact that we understand it as 299 792 458 meters per second only means that in one second there is 299 792 458 meters. If you don’t want to bother yourself by typing -or really, copy pasting- that phone number of a value, you can just have it say one space equals one time, and all your equations following gets much easier to deal with: after all , meters and seconds are but fractions of the unit of time and space.
Through c we can convert from the first three spatial dimensions to the timelike dimension, back and forth. Space and time are mingled and related into what is called spacetime.

If the OPERA experiment holds up to scrutiny, one of the two principal tenets of modern physics, special relativity, will have to be rewritten to include and explain these results.
So it’s a pretty big deal.
Obviously the scientific community is a bit skeptical. The OPERA experiment measured the speed of neutrinos by recording neutrino events after throwing protons from CERN onto a big block of graphite. They found that 730 kilometers away, at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, these pesky neutrinos traveled 0.0025% faster than the speed of light. This doesn’t sound like much but considering the speed of light is measured with a precision of 0.02 parts to the billion, that’s a difference of 6 orders of magnitude. The experiment also reduces its margin of error to less than a billion.

So yeah, physicists around the world have their collective eyebrows raised right now.

edit: Brian Cox talked to BBC radio here. the gist of it : One) Guys, check, double check and triple check because it’s a bit weird. Two) If it’s correct, maybe them neutrinos are taking a shortcut through some higher dimensions. So there’s that.

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