Sunday, September 25, 2011

New Discovery in physics > Neutrinos are faster than light






More than a 100 years ago Albert Einstein proposed in his Theory of Relativity that in vacuum, nothing in the universe could possibly travel faster than light


Last Thursday, the world’s largest physics laboratory revealed that there is a very strong possibility that it may have discovered neutrinos — “ghost-like” sub-atomic particles — that do indeed travel faster than light. 


This groundbreaking discovery was made by members of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus, or OPERA, at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, popularly known as CERN, in Switzerland


Given that the neutrinos are almost massless particles,


It is expected that they will travel at nearly the speed of light which is approximately 299,338 km per second. 


However, according to the OPERA team’s calculations, 
the particles moved faster than light and reached their destination a whole 60 nanoseconds (with a margin of error of only 10 nanoseconds) ahead of the speed at which light travels. 


While this may not seem like a large timeframe — it is only 60 billionth of a second and can’t be registered by the human brain.

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