…”so I left early.”
Thus sayeth that noted neutrino expert Yogi Berra, Bb.D.
Because humankind cannot live by politics alone, here’s a bit of an off-angle reaction to the biggest news in physics since Big Al (as I thought of him through a decade of film-and-book making/writing on the good Dr. Einstein) looked out of his window and wondered what would happen if the roofer he was watching slipped and fell. Before the poor fellow hit the pavement, of course.
That would be the announcement last Friday that an Italian team of physicists sent a beam of neutrinos from the CERN high energy physics facilty on the Franco-Swiss border through the Alps to a detector in the Italian national physics lab in Gran Sasso, a journey of almost 460 miles (~730 km). The newsworthy bit was that the experimenters measured the speed with which some 16,000 or so neutrinos covered that distance, and found that it very slightly exceeded the speed of light, “c” — the canonical limit within Einstein’s special theory of relativity that nothing may exceed.*
The effect detected by the experiment, known as OPERA, was small: 1 part in about 40,000 greater than c. But any breaking of the light barrier is a huge deal. If the result stands up, we’re in for a fun ride. There will be lots of new physics to be found. Good initial reactions can be found all over the physics blogosphere — try this, or this to get started.
For my part, as someone who’s been observing physics from the outside since I first grew fascinated with Einstein’s work in the late 1980s, I’m reminded a bit of the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1894 the (to-be) Nobel laureate A. A. Michelson famously told an audience at the University of Chicago that
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.
Timing is everything: in 1895, just one year after Michelson gave his speech Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, and it was off to the races into the 20th century revolutions in physics.
“I knew I was going to take the wrong train….”Post + Comments (72)