LAST THURSDAY, Sept. 22, a story out of Geneva, Switzerland threatened to turn the physics community on its head. Have you heard about it?
In a way, this story was concerned with a crime. It was the breaking of a speed limit, which does not, admittedly, sound like a big deal. It is a big deal, however, when the speed limit being broken is universal, or, in other words, the speed of light.
You read correctly. Reports from Geneva's CERN science team indicated that something extraordinary may have happened. Subatomic particles called neutrinos, which had been fired from the CERN laboratory in Geneva, reached their destination of Gran Sasso, Italy, 60 billionths of a second faster than they would have if they had been traveling exactly at the speed of light.\nIt is general knowledge that the speed of light is considered a constant: the universal speed limit. Although most students plug in 3x10^8 meters per second for the little 'c' in their equations, the speed of light has been measured precisely as 299,792,458 meters per second. Either way you round it, that is pretty fast. This number was supposed to be the wall that kept anything else from traveling at any greater speed. Now, according to the findings at CERN, some tiny neutrinos might have just edged around this cosmic rule.
The implications of such an event would shake the foundation of the world of physics, especially with regard to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. If the speed of light is not the fastest speed in the universe, then we are basically back at square one when it comes to time and space. All the theories scientists have grasped at for travel through space and time might have to go out the window. When Han Solo makes the jump to Light Speed in his Millennium Falcon, we will no longer be so impressed.
Hang in there, though, physics majors. The world you have learned of is very likely still the same. The scientists at CERN who conducted the experiment are, themselves, highly skeptical of the results. Einstein's theories have been challenged numerous times in the past, and never has he been disproven. "It's dangerous to lay odds against Einstein," said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, a lab trying to duplicate the results found by CERN.
Because of basic scientific practice, coupled with Einstein's track record, the researchers at CERN are not only welcoming, but are actively requesting that scientists around the globe check and recheck both the methods used and the results achieved by the experiment at CERN.
"When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it's normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny," CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci said.
Within six months, the team at Fermilab in Chicago is hoping to run the first phase of a new test, with experiments very similar to the one run by CERN to follow. The CERN experiment calculated a margin of error of ten nanoseconds, which means that the sixty nanoseconds by which the neutrinos outran light were still significant. Scientists hope that the test at Fermilab will be so precise that the margin of error will be merely one nanosecond. This shrinking of the window for error, as well as a full-fledged rerun of the experiment, should shed some light on the subject in question.
What we can take away from this story, at least at the moment, is that there is always more to learn. We go purposefully from place to place, thinking we know everything about our world and that there is nothing new to discover, but then the universe decides to throw us a curve ball.
So get excited about the dynamic world in which we live. For now, all we can do is wait to see if our understanding of physics and the universe is about to change dramatically, and if one of history's greatest physicists will turn out to be proven wrong.
Try not to panic too much. Even if it is confirmed that the universal speed limit has been broken, the universe will not immediately implode. You will not suddenly be able to divide by zero. Life as you know it will still go on, only now you will know that if you try really hard, you have got a shot at outrunning light.
Sam Novack is a Viewpoint writer for The Cavalier Daily.
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