Today I awoke to the shocking news that CERN scientists have measured, although they are treading carefully, neutrinos to be traveling faster than the speed of light.
For those who do this type of work will know that a neutrino "little neutral one" in Italian was first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in order to preserve the conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and conservation of angular momentum in the decay of an atomic nucleus into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino.
Pauli theorised that an undetected particle was carrying away the observed difference between the energy, momentum, and angular momentum of the initial and final particles. A neutrino as theorized is an electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle with a small but non-zero mass.
Now, it has always been assumed that neutrinos travel at the speed of light. Relativity required mass-less particles to travel at the speed of light. But for a particle to travel faster than the speed of light undermines Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity, one of the most important pillars in modern physics. And, of course the expansion of the fabric of space-time doesn’t count here, nor “apparent" or "effective" faster than light theories in unusually distorted regions of space-time.
The early comment by most scientists has been disbelief. For example, University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it "a flying carpet," something that was too fantastic to be believable. Indeed, CERN are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery. They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements.
You see Fermilab (the other Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago) had announced similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a margin of error that undercut its scientific significance. However, Fermilab would be capable of running the tests according to Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN.
My immediate thought after reading the CERN press release this morning was special relativity. The second, EPR and entanglement, what Einstein called spooky action at a distance. Along with hidden variables and all. Looking at it, whilst entanglement implies instantaneous communication - there is no actual information transmitted when the entangled particles affect each other. entanglement doesn’t imply faster than light communication. We can’t affect the state the particle goes into, even though it doesn't 'decide' on its state until it is observed.
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