A GROUP of scientists in Italy continue to do the impossible: breaking the universe’s speed limit. Fresh experiments have repeated earlier results showing that fast-moving particles can go quicker than the speed of light.
The research team at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory caused an international sensation in September when they released news that they had clocked tiny particles called neutrinos moving faster than light speed.
This is an impossibility according to all the laws of physics, at least as far as we understand them. Being able to break light speed would undermine most of the theories devised to help us understand the structure of the universe and the world of the atom.
The experiments involved creating bursts of neutrinos at Cern on the French-Swiss border and sending them racing through 730km (454 miles) of rock and mountain to strike a target at the Italian lab.
Neutrinos are exceedingly strange. They are produced by the sun, arrive from space and pass as effortlessly through us as through a planet.
The researchers were studying changes to the neutrinos once they reached Gran Sasso but noticed something else. The neutrinos got there 60 billionths of a second faster than a beam of light travelling the same distance.
Physicists around the world knew this must be wrong, that light speed could not be exceeded, and yet the results said otherwise.
New tests were begun immediately, changing the way the neutrinos were sent to improve accuracy. But instead of disproving the earlier tests, these neutrinos also exceeded the speed limit.
The researchers said the new results were not the “final confirmation”. This awaited similar results in labs elsewhere in the world.