So, the day after news broke of a possible revolution in physics — particles moving faster than light — a scientist leading the European experiment that made the discovery calmly explained it to a standing-room- only crowd at CERN the giant particle accelerator straddling the Swiss-French border.
The physicist, Dario Auterio, made no sweeping claims.
He did not try to explain what the results might mean for the laws of physics, let alone the broader world.
After an hour of technical talk, he simply said, “Therefore, we present to you today this discrepancy, this anomaly.”
But what an anomaly it may be. From 2009 through 2011, the massive OPERA detector buried in a mountain in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded subatomic particles called neutrinos generated at CERN arriving a smidgen early, faster than light can move in a vacuum. If confirmed, the finding would throw more than a century of physics into chaos.
“If it’s correct, it’s phenomenal,” said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois. “We’d be looking at a whole new set of rules” for how the universe works.
Those rules would bend, or possibly break, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, published in 1905. Radical at the time, the theory tied together space and time, matter and energy, and set a hard limit for the speed of light, later measured to be about 186,000 miles per second.
No experiment in 106 years had broken that speed limit.
But some 16,000 wispy neutrinos zooming underground in Europe apparently have, out-racing light by 60 billionths of a second.
Physicists expect intense scrutiny to follow, which OPERA and CERN scientists welcomed.
Fermilab operates a similar experiment, called MINOS, that shoots neutrinos from Illinois to an underground detector in Minnesota. In 2007, MINOS sniffed a hint of faster-than-light neutrinos, but the margin of error was too big to “make a claim,” Plunkett said.
Fermilab scientists will reanalyze their data, which will take six to eight months. In 2013, the MINOS detector, now offline, will restart after an upgrade. It could then offer confirmation, or refutation, of the results.
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