#NEUTRINOS FASTER THAN LIGHT HOW TO#

VOTANO: All of these measurements will be independent, each one from the other, so we will have a multiple answer. Once again, the lab on the French border will fire neutrinos their way, but this time, several instruments will clock them when they arrive at the Gran Sasso Lab in Italy.

#NEUTRINOS FASTER THAN LIGHT HOW TO#

So how to sort this out? Votano says they're gearing up for a new round of experiments this spring. A funky oscillator, if you want to get technical, but that potential problem would actually have made their measurement of the neutrinos too slow, not too fast. And when you're measuring time in billionths of a second, there's almost no room for error.Īs it happens, the scientists in Italy also found another possible problem with their gear. It turns out that this is a finicky connection, and if you don't get it just right, you can get bad information about what time it is. HARRIS: Or, at least, that's a problem that the researchers are now investigating. LUCIA VOTANO: This connector was not perfectly plugged. Lucia Votano, the head of the Gran Sasso Laboratory, says that fiber plugged into the electronics at the lab. GPS signals don't travel through rock, so the signal came into the buried lab on an optical fiber. The neutrinos in question got fired toward them from an accelerator on the Swiss-French border and they used GPS to synchronize their watches.īut here's the catch. The lab that did that experiment is buried miles under a mountain in the Italian Alps.

RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: You know how your cell phone might not charge up if you don't get it plugged in quite right? Well, it turns out that something almost that mundane might explain the astonishing news last year that neutrinos had been clocked traveling faster than the speed of light. Many scientists suspected the result was just a subtle error in the experiment and, as NPR's Richard Harris reports, now there's a possible culprit. Albert Einstein said nothing should travel faster than the speed of light, so it was quite a shock last year when physicists in Italy said they had evidence that a subatomic particle called the neutrino was violating that cosmic speed limit.

Neutrinos faster than light