Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.? So said the humourous author and science buff, Douglas Adams. If he was alive today, he might have to alter his statement to include neutrinos, which also seem to obey their own special laws. One of the most immutable laws of physics, as laid down by Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity, is that nothing travels faster than light. This theory laid the framework for our conception of the universe and the workings of time. Now, however, it might be time for a rethink of all these concepts, and it may be the first time ever that Einstein has been proven wrong. Scientists at CERN using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found to their disbelief that a certain type of particles?neutrinos?actually travelled faster than light. While it took a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete the 730 km journey from CERN to another lab, scientists found that neutrinos arrived at the destination 60 billionth of a second earlier. The calculations imply that while light travels at 299,792,458 metres per second (mps), the neutrinos were apparently travelling at 299,798,454 mps. A small margin, to be sure, but the result would have been as astonishing even if the margin was a thousand times smaller. The point is that something never supposed to happen actually took place: light came in second in a race. The import and sensitivity of the discovery was such that CERN is yet to officially publish these findings, even after testing 15,000 neutrinos and getting the same result, and is looking for further confirmation.
The most theoretical of the effects of these findings, if confirmed, is that this could provide the groundwork for a single unified theory of physics?finally bringing together Einstein?s theory of relativity and the quantum theory. In a science fiction twist, it also blurs the line between past and present. Say, for example?s sake, a star explodes at point X 1,000 km from Earth, and the light reaches us in 1 second. If we can immediately send neutrinos to point X, and they take 0.8 seconds to reach, then they?ll reach even before the star explodes! Even in practical terms, the speed of light has set the benchmark of how fast data travels (think Internet connections); anything travelling faster than that opens up huge possibilities. And these are just the conceivable applications even before the use of neutrinos is mastered.
