(Image source: CERN)

BY STEVEN SPARKMAN

ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY

You're watching multisource science video news analysis from Newsy.

Big news out of CERN. No, they still haven’t found the Higgs boson, and even if they did not much in physics would change. But what they have found could strike right at the heart of a century of modern physics. Here’s CNN with the story.

ATIKA SHUBERT: “Scientists in Switzerland shot a particle beam to Italy. 2.4 milliseconds -- that’s how long it should take for a beam of light to cover that distance. But in fact what scientists found was that neutrinos -- these teeny tiny subatomic particles that have virtually no mass and no electrical charge -- were actually able to arrive even faster.”

Einstein’s theory of special relativity established the speed of light as the absolute maximum speed in the universe -- nothing can go faster. MSNBC explains, if these neutrinos really are making a speedy escape from Switzerland, it’ll be a game changer in physics.

“Einstein’s theory has been the basis of physics research for the last century. So if these neutrinos really can beat the speed of light, it would not only poke holes in his legacy, it could reshape our whole understanding of time and space.”

What kind of impact would this have? A scientist tells Sky News, if these neutrinos really do beat light in a race, all your sci-fi dreams might come true.

COLIN BRAZIER: “But we’re talking billionths of a second.”
DAVID WHITEHOUSE: “It doesn’t matter ... The fact that it is close to light or just over the speed of light changes our fundamental understanding of the way the universe operates.”
BRAZIER: “Is time travel possible?”
WHITEHOUSE: “Yes. … Time travel, faster than light travel, exploration of the universe -- an amazing world of strange new physics opens up in front of us.”

But though some media are declaring Einstein wrong, the scientists themselves have been much more cautious. There are other neutrino experiments in the U.S. and Japan that will be looking for the same effect. A writer for the Telegraph says the champagne bottles should stay corked until those results are in.

“...as David Hume once said, a wise man proportions his belief to his evidence -- or, if you like, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the physical sciences of my lifetime. Or it could be a measurement error. I hope it's the former. But ... it's still, at this stage, probably the latter.”

Other physicists saying there’s probably an error isn’t meant as a jab at CERN scientists. It’s just the simpler explanation at the moment. But the CERN scientists know this, and spent most of their research paper explaining how they tried to correct for every possible error. NPR reports some of their efforts.

“...to measure the Neutrino’s speed, they need to know exactly when the particles leave the accelerator, when they arrive in Italy, and exactly what distance they travelled. And that’s tricky. … They were able to nail the distance from the Swiss accelerator to their detector to within a foot. They also spent many months getting the clocks to sync up to within a few billionths of a second.” (Video source: CERN)

Even if the results are confirmed, it doesn’t mean relativity is shattered. Other explanations could account for the speedy particles. A writer for Discover Magazine suggests Lorentz Invariance -- the idea the everyone measures the speed of light the same way -- might need some tweaking. Or:

“... there are more way-out possibilities. Graininess in spacetime from quantum gravity might affect the propagation of nearly-massless particles; extra dimensions might provide a shortcut through space. … But it’s still a long shot at this time.”

Finally, a blogger for the Washington Post says -- this is just how science works. The broad theories, like relativity, often have little caveats that go with them. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong, just incomplete.

“Science ... is marvelously self-correcting over time, and you should not expect a theory that has been upheld through experiment and observation for 106 years to get jettisoned all of a sudden like last week’s tuna salad. If the new measurement is confirmed, it will merely show that Einstein didn’t completely cover the universe with the giant tarpaulin of his mind.”


Transcript by Newsy.