Neutrinos have been caught speeding past a fundamental law that modern physics is bound by. Well, they may have at least.
The result was clocked during the Oscillation Project with Emusion tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment where neutrinos were shot from a CERN lab in Switzerland to a detector in Italy. It was recorded that they arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than if they had been travelling at the speed of light
This is a truly astonishing result as the speed of light, according to Einstein's theory, is a universal constant that cannot be broken. This has successfully been the basis of modern physics for over 100 years, so if the speedy neutrinos have broken this constant it could spark a fresh new look to scientific theory.
However, before you start to rearrange your science books to the scientific history section of your bookshelf along with Aristotle's theory of the five elements, there are other possible explanations that could account for the neutrinos early arrival.
During a seminar at CERN the scientists who were responsible for the experiment were grilled about how they accounted for all possible sources of error that could have distorted the readings and were praised for how rigorously they had eliminated such factors. The procedure was described as "an extremely beautiful experiment" by Samuel Ting a Nobel laureate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. But some scientists believe that there could be some unexpected sources that could have caused the anomaly.
When you are dealing with accuracy like a nanosecond it is easy to look past the sheer precision needed to accurately measure such a incomprehensibly tiny figure. For the average human, (as well as any other living creature on earth) a nanosecond is impossible to reminisce, take a stop watch for example, and think about how fast the tenth of a second column changes, it is just about possible to make out the numbers changing. However, this is just 1 second split into 10 parts. a nanosecond is 1 second split into 1,000,000,000 (one billion) parts. Therefore the tiniest of errors would blow the result out of the water.
The other possibility is that the neutrinos slipped through extra dimensions, effectively taking a short cut, thus arriving early at their destination. It is hard to imagine how this works, so think of it in terms of a simple experiment:
Record the time it takes a ball-bearing (travelling at a constant speed) to travel from one end of a garden hose bent into a semicircle to the other. Now imagine you were to add a new 'dimension' to the garden hose by attaching a piece of straight hose that joins both ends of the semicircle. A ball-bearing travelling through this 'dimension' at the same constant speed would arrive earlier than the ball-bearing travelling through the semicircle.
This would confirm aspects of the String Theory, a theory that is being devised to combine all scientific theory into one monumental 'all knowing' theory. String Theory states there must be many more dimensions screwed up in the fabric of the universe than what we, as three dimensional beings are able to access in any practical way.
So you see that the findings are still in their early stages and going forward, other experiments will be undertaken to try and help explain these genuinely remarkable results from the OPERA experiment... And for the time being E is still equal to mc².
