Source: BBC
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
A meeting at Cern, the
world's largest physics lab, has addressed results that suggest
subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light.
The team has published its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.
If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science may come tumbling down.
Antonio Ereditato added "words of caution" to his Cern
presentation because of the "potentially great impact on physics" of the
result.
The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's
ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part
by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the
idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken
to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a
particle breaking the limit.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," the report's author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't.
"When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'."
Friday's meeting was designed to begin this process, with
hopes that other scientists will find inconsistencies in the
measurements and, hopefully, repeat the experiment elsewhere.
"Despite the large [statistical] significance of this
measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since
it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the
continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic
effects," Dr Ereditato told the meeting.
"We look forward to independent measurement from other experiments."
