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Friday, November 18, 2011

Current Events: Faster than light

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236
By: Jason Palmer
Source: BBC News

             It is well known as being the fastest thing in the universe, light, but a group of scientists believe that they have found something that is faster than light. They set out to prove this by launching Neutrinos through 730 kilometers of solid rock, from Cern, Geneva, to Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. The Neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have proving that neutrinos travel faster than light. This is a major discovery because throughout history scientists believed that light was the fastest thing in the universe but now tests suggest that light isn't the fastest thing in the universe, which could shatter basic principles of physics. When a test like this is run the timing has to be completely perfect, which means that even if they are off by one millionth of a second the whole experiment is invalid. Because of this they are now working on addressing any potential errors although after 20 consecutive tests they all yielded more or less the same results.
              I chose this article because it was very surprising to me when I first saw it because I've always thought that light was the fastest thing in the universe. After I read into it I thought that it was quite interesting even though the time difference is only 60 billionths of a second. This could be a massive scientific breakthrough and I thought it was cool to read and write about it.

Graphic of the Opera experiment

1 comment:

  1. Do you believe that people will be able to be transported in the future? They say that we could if we could travel faster than light. Maybe this is just the beginning of more to come. :)

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