Turns out Einstein's cosmic speed limit does apply to neutrinos after all.
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WASHINGTON: An experiment showing particles moving faster than the speed of light last year has been exposed as a mistake due to a faulty wire connection.
"A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame," said the report, published by Science Insider this week.
The initial findings, which saw neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds earlier that the 2.3 milliseconds taken by light in experiments conducted between the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland and a laboratory in Italy, sparked intrigue and scepticism in the scientific community. If confirmed, this result would have been at odds with Einstein's theory of relativity, which has held sway for more than a century.
According to the report, "[the] 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fibre optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer."
Explaining neutrinos' early arrival
Neutrinos are electrically neutral particles so small that only recently were they found to have mass. Scientists blasted a beam producing billions upon billions of neutrinos from CERN, which straddles the French-Swiss border near Geneva, to the Gran Sasso Laboratory 730 km away in Italy.
"After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fibre, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed," said the report. "Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis."
