Current events

In September 2011, scientists working on the OPERA Italian experiment reported a measurement that was too astonishing to be true. They found neutrinos, supersmall and ultrafast particles that can travel through almost anything. The scientists measured the speed of neutrinos that zipped from one underground laboratory to another one and reported that they flew faster than light.

This exited some scientist and troubled others, the speed of light was the universal speed limit, and it was the fastest thing in the universe. If neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light, many ideas about space time and the nature would be proven wrong. The OPERA results meant that either our understanding is based on an error or the experiment was wrong.

The explanation had more to do with the broken machinery that the breaking of the laws of physics. Which still means that light is the fastest thing on earth.

In a February press conference. The OPERA scientist reported that a loose cable probably caused the mistake in the measurement which would mean that neutrinos did nothing unnatural after all. They traveled from a laboratory on the border of Switzerland to Italy. The faulty cable carried signal to the main clock that measured the time, which cause inaccurate measurement.

 “We should have been more cautious in the way we framed the results,” physicist Luca Stanco toldScience News. Stanco works on OPERA at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Padua, Italy. “Now we are a little embarrassed.”

“It was always clear to me that the results could not have been true,” he told Science News.