For the last three years, the CERN lab in Switzerland has been conducting experiments that seem to show that certain subatomic particles, neutrinos, can – and occasionally do – move faster than the speed of light.
Since Einstein published his theories, it has been accepted fact that nothing moves faster than light - but they have been able to repeat their experiments, and duplicate their results hundreds of times!
So they published their findings yesterday in the hopes that somebody somewhere could show them what they were doing wrong.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
In their experiments, the CERN team prepared a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.
I can’t help them with their experiment, but it did remind me of a limerick:
An astronaut once took a flight
In a spaceship faster than light
He came back the next day
In a relative way
And arrived on the previous night
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