After a bout of vigorous scrutiny by scientists worldwide, Einstein’s well known equation E=mc^2 continues to hold true. Sadly for us, we may have witnessed the dawn of personal computers and handheld phoning devices, but we will not be witness to the next large scale breakthrough in experimental physics.
Here is a little time line:
Three years ago: OPERA, (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) an experiment designed to study the transformation of Tuon Neutrinos to Tau Neutrinos by sending this rare, nearly mass-less particle between CERN which can be found near Geneva in Switzerland and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in central Italy. What are Neutrinos you might ask? Neutrinos are tiny light particles produced by the sun. They are fairly unaffected by their encounters with our planet but can also be produced for experiments through several methods, the Neutrinos used for this experiment are produced by smashing protons in to graphite slabs.
September 23rd 2011: Scientists with OPERA, announced that experimental data seemed to suggest that Neutrinos had traveled faster than the speed of light. The experiment sent neutrinos underground between laboratories in Sweden and Italy in 60.7 nanoseconds less than the speed of light in a vacuum. While this caused great amazement and scepticism on the part of fellow scientists, no one could be more perplexed than the researchers themselves. Over three years, 16,111 neutrino interactions had been measured and recorded with the use of sophisticated measuring equipment including the use of GPS co-ordinates for a distance of 750km (give or take 20cm) and synched atomic clocks in the two laboratories. Rather puzzled about how they reached such a startling result, they invited others to independently test their results.
September 23rd – October 27th 2011: Members of the scientific community come back in force with potential errors ranging from an inaccurate measurements by the GPS satellites which didn’t take in to account the effects of relativity to the fact that Neutrinos didn’t seem to have lost any energy in their travels, a sure fire indicator that the tiny particles had not passed the speed of light. Explanations of the bizarre behaviour also include the possibility that the Neutrinos have fit themselves through an alternate dimension to make the trip in such a short time. Typically, opinions are split with some scientists feeling they have already discredited the findings in a concrete manner, while others are still optimistically hoping for a breakthrough to liven up their field of study. On either side of the debate, scientists continue to come up with an explanation for this bizarre particle behaviour with little success.
Late November 2011: Taking all this advice in to account, OPERA has been scheduled for a redo ending late November. Significant changes in their methodology include changing the length of the pulses sent between the two laboratories from 10 microseconds to 2 nanoseconds and using a new timing scheme to calculate the time each particle requires to travel the 750 km between labs. In addition to these more obvious changes to the experimental process OPERA researchers also have their calculators out and are re-evaluating factors like planetary spin and continental drift initially considered negligible for the experiment. Presumably the new trial run will be more precise in the eyes of the scientific community but it will take years to confirm or deny the results of this experiment.
Sometime 2012: An important part of proving this experiment is independent verification. Scientists at Fermilab working on the MINOS neutrino experiment hope to have results by midyear 2012 after upgrading their reactor this December.
In the end who knows whether E will still equal mc^2? Science will duke it out for awhile before we can know for sure one way or another. Perhaps two decades in to the future our children will learn not about that funny little German man’s amazing theories and his equation for energy but instead study the fastest particle known to man, the Neutrino.
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