As neutrinos bolt Einsteins world,inquiry begins

Many think the same will happen with this finding.

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Once upon a time,the only thing that traveled faster than speed of light was gossip. Thanks to the Internet,the whole physics world was watching Friday when Dario Autiero,of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon in France,in front of a palpably skeptical roomful of physicists,put a whole new category of speed demons on the table,namely the shadowy subatomic particles known as neutrinos. He was describing a recent experiment in which neutrinos were clocked going faster than the speed of light,the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity back in 1905.

According to Autieros team,neutrinos from a particle accelerator at CERN,outside Geneva,had raced to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy a distance of 454 miles about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. We cant explain the observed effect in terms of systematic uncertainties, Autiero said. Therefore,the measurement indicates a neutrino velocity higher than the speed of light.

Autiero said his group had spent six months trying to explain away the result,but couldnt. Given the stakes for physics,he said,it wouldnt be proper to attempt any theoretical interpretation of the results. We present to you this discrepancy or anomaly today, he said.

The purported effect sounds slight,but to be even slightly on the wrong side of the speed of light is forbidden in the world that Einstein described. Faster-than-light travel can also lead to the possibility of time travel,something most physicists do not believe is possible. Relativity has been tested over and over again for a century.

This is quite a shake-up, said Alvaro de Rujula,a theorist at CERN. The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.

And the assembled CERN physicists were only too happy to oblige. They asked detailed questions about,among other things,how the scientists had measured the distance from CERN to Gran Sasso to what is claimed to be an accuracy of 20 cm,extending GPS measurements underground. Had they,for example,taken into account the location of Moon and tidal bulges in the Earths crust?

The recent history is strewn with reports of suspicious data bumps that might be new particles or planets and if true could change the way we think about the world,but then disappear with more data or scrutiny. Many think the same will happen with this finding.

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Some physicists,inside and outside of CERN,were critical of this process,saying the laboratory was giving too much weight to a premature result by a group that was not even part of CERN.

Earlier measurements of neutrino speeds was done by Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search in 2007. Jenny Thomas of University College London,said the Minos experiment would be able to do a more precise measurement in about six months. The lights going to shine on us while we repeat our experiment, he said. DENNIS OVERBYE