Saturday, September 24, 2011

Was Einstein Wrong?

I have been waiting to hear about the results of the experiments at CERN for a while, ever since I heard about the LHC experiments. Then, there were delays and I lost track and never learned what the outcome was. Now here comes this news! Scientists have detected sub atomic particle moving faster than the speed of light, a finding that undermines Einstein's theory of relativity that claims the speed of light to be a cosmic constant, an upper limit on how fast anything in universe can travel. Now, how much faster was the detected velocity? 60 nanoseconds faster! My intuition tells me the difference is not large enough and might be do to some error, as the article mentions to. But for theoretical physicist, especially those specialized in particle physics, this may be a large enough number!

I guess we have to be careful what we wish for. Do we want to break the light-speed barrier? Are we ready to accept the consequences and live in a world in which time travel would then become possible?


Reference:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/science-light-idUSL5E7KM4CW20110922

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