Scientific history is replete with wonderful quotes. Circa 1633, Galileo said, “Yet, it [the Earth] moves,” when pressured to recant helio-centrism. In 1926, Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice!” while discussing quantum theory with Niels Bohr, who expostulated, “Don’t tell God what to do!”
The latest gem comes from Subir Sarkar, head of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at Oxford. Dr Sarkar offered a gobsmacked, “If we do not have causality, we’re buggered!” when Cern’s Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) group released tentative results suggesting the speed of light can be exceeded.
If those Cern results are valid, they will lead to modifications of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. In turn, if Relativity is reworked, that means re-examination of the Standard Model and all theories about the origin of the universe and the fundamental forces of nature.
For three years, Opera has been running experiments with neutrinos. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles with no electrical charge and very little mass. They are unaffected by electromagnetic fields and pass through solid matter as if it doesn’t exist. Neutrinos arise naturally from nuclear decay. They can be also be generated in lab conditions.
Opera creates a stream of neutrinos at its accelerator in Geneva and sends them underground to a detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, about 730 km away. The speed can be determined by dividing the distance by the time taken for neutrinos to be detected in Gran Sasso.
The speeds registered by the neutrinos consistently came out around 60 nanoseconds (there are 10^9 or 1 US billion ns in a second) quicker than photons (light particles) travelling the same distance. Opera rechecked calculations and methodology for six months before releasing data into public domain and appealing to other scientific bodies.
Cern is a highly respected multinational institution with some of the best scientists in the world. It has the best available equipment. It has been very transparent, releasing all data, and methodology, for inspection and validation (or falsification).
The experiment requires extreme accuracy in terms of measuring both the exact distance between the two labs and the times taken between the creation of neutrino in Geneva and detection in Gran Sasso. Light takes 2.43 milliseconds (1,000 ms=one second) to travel that distance and the neutrinos seem to take 60 ns less.
Light travels about 30 centimetres in 1 ns. Opera claims experimental error is about 1 ns. By that baseline, 6 ns is six times too large to be an error. But a mistake of 2 metres in the “about 730 km” distance between labs would negate the results as would very small errors in time measurement.
Assuming the results are correct, it calls into question Einstein’s assumption that nothing with mass can travel faster than a photon in “our” universe. Photons are massless and in vacuum, they move at about 299,792.5 km per second, a constant denoted as “c”.
The famous equation e (energy) = mc^2 (mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light) is derived from the Special Theory of Relativity. Any object with serious mass would need near-infinite energy to travel at light speed.
There are also implications of time-dilation. Time slows for anything at significant fractions of c. In an “Einsteinian” universe (actually called a Galilean Universe), the direction of time can only be reversed by going faster than light. This is why Dr Sarkar points out that the Cern data call causality (cause following effect) into question.
Einstein’s theories have been verified many times, with data derived during eclipses, and by atomic clocks on spacecraft, among other things. They are derived from Maxwell’s Laws of Electromagnetism, and the Michaelson-Morley Experiment of 1877, which are set in stone. If the new data force rethinking, pretty much all the assumptions of the last 150 years of physics would be called into question.
