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Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat forbidden by Einstein's theory of special relativity
Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.
The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second.
"When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn't think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors.
The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect."
Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered."
Kostelecky said that if the result was verified – a big if – it might pave the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century.
Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.
Originally posted by TrueBrit
After all , the neutrino may have been traveling faster than light, but consider this... it still arrived at its destination after it was fired. If causality was completely buggered up, then it would have arrived before they even thought the experiment up, let alone fired the neutrino off on its travels.