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发帖数: 17225 | 1 September 23, 2011 10:32 AM PrintText
Faster than light measurement shocks physicists
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(AP) GENEVA - Physicists on the team that measured particles traveling
faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about
the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.
Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world's foremost
laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle,
the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of
Albert Einstein.
"To our great surprise we found an anomaly," said Antonio Ereditato, who
participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team.
An anomaly is a mild way of putting it.
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Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen,
according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of
light — 186,282 miles per second — has long been considered a cosmic speed
limit.
The team — a collaboration between France's National Institute for Nuclear
and Particle Physics Research and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory —
fired a neutrino beam 454 miles underground from Geneva to Italy.
They found it traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That's sixty
billionth of a second, a time no human brain could register.
"You could say it's peanuts, but it's not. It's something that we can
measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty," Ereditato told The
Associated Press.
If the experiment is independently repeated — most likely by teams in the
United States or Japan — then it would require a fundamental rethink of
modern physics.
"Everybody knows that the speed limit is c, the speed of light. And if you
find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this
is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us," said
Ereditato, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Physicists not involved in the experiment have been understandably skeptical.
Alvaro De Rujula, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired,
said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error.
If not, and it's a big if, the door would be opened to some wild
possibilities.
The average person, said De Rujula, "could, in principle, travel to the past
and kill their mother before they were born."
But Ereditato and his team are wary of letting such science fiction story
lines keep them up at night.
"We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the
confirmation," he told the AP. "Everybody is free to do what they want: to
think, to claim, to dream."
He added: "I'm not going to tell you my dreams."
转帖http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/23/scitech/main20110689.shtml |
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