Be Careful With Faster-Than-Light Implications

By Allan Ko, INSPIRE OLC, 11th Grade

On Thursday, September 22, a team of scientists from all over the world announced that they had measured neutrinos (subatomic particles) traveling faster than the speed of light. Using a machine based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, the researches beamed neutrinos to detectors in Gran Sasso, Italy over a period of three years while working on a project called OPERA.

The distance from CERN to Gran Sasso is about 730 kilometers. Light would take roughly 2.4 milliseconds to traverse this distance, but the researches say that the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds less time to reach Gran Sasso.

If this experiment is replicated and verified (Fermilab is one of the centers that is able to repeat this experiment), it would necessitate at the very least a revision of Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which is built on the axiom that nothing can travel faster than light speed.

Special relativity, the stuff that fills the last chapters of every physics textbook, is always presented as new, exotic science with consequences like time dilation and length contraction. With light speed being the ultimate speed limit, we can make statements about causality, which events can influence other events, and how everything except light is relative. If light speed is broken, most of these concepts are broken along with it.

Granted, faster-than-light movement opens a whole new world of possibilities. Sending information or particles back in time is the coolest science-fiction consequence, but this could also be a glimpse into a completely new theory of the universe. Maybe the particles took a shortcut through higher dimensions (think tessering, in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time), bringing the possibility of teleportation. Maybe they jumped through wormholes or “subspace”, Star Trek warp drive style.

At this point, however, it’s just as likely that the team of scientists simply made a mistake: overlooked a factor, or had slightly faulty machinery. When 105 years of science are on the line, caution before proceeding is advisable. Keep a stance of hopeful skepticism; skeptical, as all scientists should be, but hopeful that this data will lead mankind to an even better understanding of how the cosmos works. Who knows? Maybe in a few decades, these events will appear in the final chapters of our children’s physics textbooks.