What OPERA have achieved in measuring the speed of the Neutrino then, is fantastically significant in its own right. To summarise why – the Neutrino (1) is so small it is completely invisible to even our most powerful microscopes, (2) travels millions of meters per second and (3) can ‘walk through walls’ and hence whizzes untraced through any detection equipment you might have set up to catch it. The fact we are at a junction in history where human beings would even consider it possible to measure the speed of a particle like the neutrino is really quite astonishing. Do not be fooled -the neutrino community is not one that takes regular breaks, and this is just as well, because we are dealing with one of the most elusive and difficult to study particles. Rewind to the summer of the previous year, and representatives from the same neutrino community were paddling their feet in the Greek sea, dining on a beach and relaxing in the June sun at Neutrino 2010 – the annual neutrino physics conference. Is this result really as controversial as it has been made out in the popular press? Or might it be the dissemination of science which is actually changing – as opposed to one of the cornerstones of modern physics? Faster than light neutrinos?īut let’s pause for a minute and take a deep breath. If that wasn’t enough, it also has the potential to change our understanding of the universe because it challenges an established assertion of Einstein’s Relativity: that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. The paper is also arguably the first widely discussed paper featuring results from the Large Hadron Collider collaboration at CERN. The neutrino paper is controversial because it is one of the first publications to gain international press attention without appearance in a commercially-run journal.
NEUTRINOS FASTER THAN LIGHT FREE
The arXiv is an open access, free repository for academic work hosted by Cornell University. OPERA is an experiment with an established and well respected team of particle physicists. In October 2011, the Neutrino community at OPERA self-published a controversial paper on the physics pre-print server, the arXiv. Rosie Walton finds out what all the neutrino fuss is about.
0 kommentar(er)
