It must be rough being a scientist. First, believing in anything has to be somewhere between problematic and impossible and second, it’s a business where (surprise!) your whole life’s work having been based on a presumption that turns out to be wrong gets thrown out the window. Ouch.
We all know what happened to “the world is flat” theory. The smug have had a good laugh over it. Fast forward to Einstein’s theory of relativity which sets the maximum speed limit in the universe at 300,000 km per second or, the speed of light. Over the nearly hundred years the theory’s been around we’ve done all kinds of experiments proving it. This is it. We are smart. E=mc2.
But then…
Last month the folks at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) dropped a bombshell. They’ve been beaming subatomic particles known as neutrinos from their facility outside Geneva, Switzerland to another in the Italian mountain Gran Sasso (or Great Pebble, a rather conservative choice of reference for the usually sensuous Italians), and measuring their speed with great care. Lo and behold, the little things are traveling, “at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light.” * Skeptical, CERN has repeated the experiment some 15,000 times and exhaustively checked for errors. So far it looks like the 300,000 km/sec speed limit is no longer valid and others in the scientific community are scurrying to either refute or establish the finding.
Looking out the window, the world appears not to have changed. Photons, neutrinos and FedEx trucks are zooming around, business as usual. So what’s the big deal? For the most part I don’t know, but the discovery does put a fly in the murky ointment of time. According to the theory of relativity, time, going forward, slows down as we increase our velocity and eventually at the speed of light stops. Ok, I sort of got that. Presuming this part of the theory holds, CERN’s finding implies it is possible that time travels backwards. At least for the neutrinos in question.
Oh yeah… time traveling backwards. Like the world being round, at first it would be a bit of a stretch. The movie Time Bandits suddenly becomes a documentary and some day as we listen to President Lincoln give his Gettysburg Address, we may muse over the so passé notion time only goes forward.
Gordon Bunker
* http://public.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html
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