Neutrinos and the speed of light

Neutrinos have been flashed at more than the speed of light.

Will anyone call the police to stop those trouble makers?

September 22, 2011, OPERA experience, CERN.

Neutrinos’ travel speed is measured at about 7 km/s more than the speed of light on the same travel. But theories do not allow any particle to “drive” so fast!

Those guys are fast

What could have occurred? It seems that they received some boost.

In fact, those superluminal speeds have already been observed. In water for example, electrons can travel faster than light. Water is material, so photons are slown down more than electrons. That is called the “Cerenkov Effect”. But that is only true when we compare they speeds in the material and no particle has ever been measured at more than the famous “c” value (about 300,000 km/s).

The OPERA experience – which has been repeated 16 000 times to draw a statistic – consists in sending neutrinos in the giant CERN ring. The aim of the experience was not sending them at more than the speed of light, but the measures revealed those neutrinos passed through the limit.

Physicians do not want to make any commentary about those results, because they don’t want to start refuting the existing theories. But they are still looking for some explanations. What excites the audience is that neutrinos might have taken a hole in another dimension and “cheated”. This makes everyone start thinking about dimensional travel, going back in time…

So even if we won’t learn more about superluminal speed before 2013, we can start thinking physics are –one time more– going to evolve.

Be careful

But in fact, I would rather buy a new GPS to avoid being flashed at more than the regular speed.

B. Hell