I can't really, or I don't want to yet. Spent too many hours on the can in college obsessing over relativity for it to just go down the toilet because some goddamn neutrinos think they can go faster than light. But that's what measurements taken at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-t Racking Apparatus (OPERA) in Italy's subterranean Gran Sasso laboratory are indicating: neturinos, neutral particles that don't really interact with much stuff in our world, might move faster than light (the recognized universal speed limit for everything, the absoluteness of which gives us relativity and spacetime).From the Science mag blog:Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. "It's a straightforward time-of-flight measurement," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. "We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school." Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.Given everything relativity's done for us in the past (almost) 100 years, no one is especially eager to say it's wrong. It could just be an error somewhere and probably is. But, man, think of the possibilities. Wouldn't neutrinos be able to travel back in time? Why would there be a different speed limit for neutrinos than all of the rest of the stuff that makes up our world? Ahh! The possibilities. OK, OK, I'll probably spend some time wrapping later, maybe when I'm walking the dog or something.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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