Boo! Hiss! Dutch Scientist Rains on Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Parade
CERN researchers who think they've measured particles traveling faster than the speed of light may not have fully accounted for relativity, according to a new paper.
Don't fire up your spaceship's FTL drive just yet, folks. Those neutrinos that CERN scientists thought they saw traveling faster than the speed of light a few weeks ago look like they may have only been moving at close to light speed.
Last month, a team of international researchers with the news that particles they had been firing for several years from the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland at detectors at the OPERA facility in Gran Sasso, Italy placed about 450 miles away appeared to be arriving at their destination faster than the time it would take light to get there.
The particles, traveling through air, water, and rock, shouldn't have hit the Gran Sasso detectors sooner than about 2.4 thousandths of a second after being fired, which is the time it would take light to travel the distance between the two points. Yet the CERN researchers reported that their neutrinos were getting to the target 64 nanoseconds faster—meaning that they were traveling faster than light, supposedly impossible according to the Theory of Special Relativity.
Now other scientists say that a failure to fully account for the effects of relativity is what caused the original researchers to supposedly mis-measure the time it was taking the neutrinos to travel using a GPS satellite, despite the CERN team saying they had factored relativity into their calculations.
A new paper by Dutch researcher Ronald A.J. van Elburg lays out the case that the GPS satellite measuring the neutrinos' movements was also moving relative to the CERN and OPERA facilities as it orbited the Earth. Briefly, van Elburg asserts that the effects of relativity as they pertain to the GPS satellite's measurements require two corrections to the perceived time of travel.
Lo and behold, it turns out that applying that double correction shaves 64 nanoseconds off the neutrinos' travel time, according to van Elburg, "[t]hus bringing the apparent velocities of neutrinos back to a value not significantly different from the speed of light."
It's too early to say whether that's the final verdict on this story—the CERN scientists did claim to have accounted for such factors in their report. But for now, it appears that making the jump to hyperspace may be just as far off as it was before some seemingly super-fast neutrinos got us all excited about being Han Solo.