1.21 Gigawatts Update: Upon Further Review…

About three months ago I wrote about the possibility that some Neutrinos (weak sub-atomic particles) had traveled faster than the speed of light, in an experiment that sent them from a lab in Switzerland to one in Italy. I talked about how everyone was in a huge uproar because it would have disproved Einstein’s theory of relativity (that no information or energy can travel faster than the speed of light). I also pointed out how Einstein’s theories on physics caused a similar uproar when it disproved some of Isaac Newton’s theories, and that discovery is the point of science. We can’t fear change when all the data points to it.

It turns out they might have been right. Recently it was discovered, a loose fiber optic cable was causing one of the atomic clocks to produce invalid results. The scientific community unanimously unbunched their panties and nodded knowingly: surely this was the reason that these particles appeared to travel faster than light. Since I’m not a scientist, I was less happy with the continuation of the status quo, but I understood that you can’t argue with facts (Well, you can, you’re just not suppose to).

Two days later, the CERN laboratory announced that indeed there was a loose fiber optic cable as well as another problem with an oscillator that was time stamping the readings to GPS signals. The real surprise though, is that the result of these two errors would cause the data to underestimate the speed of the neutrinos, not overestimate it.

That’s right. They may actually be traveling even faster than we thought. In May new tests will be performed to give more precise readings than have been previously achieved. Again, the big take away (as far as I’m concerned):

Time Travel – Still Possible