“The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” – Damon Runyon
Randall Munroe of xkcd sums up my opinion of yesterday’s announcement that physicists at the OPERA detector in Italy had discovered that some neutrinos from the CERN accelerator had apparently travelled faster than the speed of light. For those interested, you can read the paper here. I haven’t had a chance to review the paper yet, but I plan to. If it’s true, it means that relativity’s prediction that the speed of light in a vacuum is the “speed limit” for the universe is false. That would mean having to do a substantial rewrite of some portions of physics.
But don’t throw away your copy of A Brief History of Time just yet. The fact of the matter is, this isn’t the first time that there was an initial announcement that neutrinos were travelling faster-than-light. Another similar announcement was made in 2007 by a different group, but the results turned out after further review to show that neutrinos travelled slightly slower than the speed of light.
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