Physicists at the CERN laboratory have put the final nail in the coffin for the idea that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. They also confirmed that the groundbreaking results from 2011 can be blamed on faulty equipment.
Back in September 2011, a team of particle physicists detected neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light as they travelled from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab. They smashed the universal speed limit by 60 nanoseconds — a result that was constant, even after 15,000 repetitions of the process.
The results seem to run counter to century’s worth of physics and would overturn Einsten’s special theory of relativity if true. As such, CERN called for more experiments to double-check the findings.
via Wired
Image: LHC dipole / Nuno Castro / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
