You just might be able to go back in time and do dinosaur hunting or kill Hitler, or at least prevent the reality show boom on television or stop facebook from changing format every two weeks.
According to a release from an international team of scientists, the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland managed to accelerate a stream of neutrinos to the point that they arrived in San Grasso, Italy 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have. According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, this ought not to have been possible.
"The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research center near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.
A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos -- tiny particles that pervade the cosmos -- were fired over a period of 3 years from CERN toward Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors.
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Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- less than light beams would have taken."
According to the Special Theory, as one approaches the speed of light the passage of time slows to a theoretical halt as one attains light speed. Thus, there has been much speculation in science fiction that time travel might be possible if one were to exceed that speed.
Providing one does not accidentally kill one's grandmother before she meets Grandpa, that is.
Be seeing you.
Reuters
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