Friday, November 18, 2011

Faster Than a Speeding Neutrino

.
After an experiment gave data suggesting that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light last September, the physicists at CERN ran the experiment a second time:
Scientists from Cern, the Swiss home of the Large Hadron Collider, sent another beam of subatomic particles over 450 miles to a laboratory in Gran Sasso in the Italian Alps.

And after running the modified follow-up test 20 times, they recorded exactly the same results as before.
The science is not settled by consensus, however. There are many more tests that need to be done to verify the conclusions from these results.

One unusual observation in this second experiment is that in all cases Jimmy John's sandwich delivery drivers even beat the neutrinos.

One further question as to the quality of these results is concern over environmental conditions that may have skewed the data. After all, what self-respecting light wave would be in any hurry to leave Switzerland to get into Italy? And neutrinos are well known to have little discerning taste.

No comments: