Okay, Superman could travel faster than a speeding bullet, but nothing’s supposed to get faster than the speed of light. It’s like the cosmic speed limit. But yet, it seems to be happening.
If Einstein were alive, his hair would be standing on end. As it is, he must be spinning uneasily in his grave. His famous theory of relativity, which only he and 12 other people have ever understood, is dependent on light traveling at 186,000 miles per second, not 186,000 per second and a micro-smidgen over.
But not just Einstein’s theory, all of modern physics is built on this notion that in a race, nothing beats light. An article in the Washington Post reports that the scientists who recently made the amazing discovery that neutrinos are outrunning light have now made it again. They write:
For more than a century, the speed of light has been locked in as the universe’s ultimate speed limit. No experiment had seen anything moving faster than light, which zips along at 186,000 miles per second.
Much of modern physics — including Albert Einstein’s famous theory of relativity — is built on that ultimate speed limit.
The scientific world stopped and gaped in September when the OPERA team announced it had seen neutrinos moving just a hint faster than light.
“If it’s correct, it’s phenomenal,” said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois, in September. “We’d be looking at a whole new set of rules” for how the universe works.
A whole new set of rules for how the universe works, sounds like a big deal, but not everyone’s all that upset about it. For instance, this guy in England writing in the Guardian says, “Faster than the speed of light? We’ll need to be patient. I’d love it if neutrinos really have exceeded the speed of light. But I’m not eating my shorts just yet.”
Well, that’s good, we wouldn’t want any premature shorts eating just because the universe has been turned inside out. But apparently, this guy actually did promise to eat his shorts under certain conditions. Boxer shorts, too.
Threats to eat one’s boxer shorts on live television if one is proved wrong should not be made lightly by scientists, however confident they might be in their pronouncements. Not because of the health risks, the potential for public humiliation, or because it somehow trivialises the scientific process, but because it leads the public to think that science is about vested interest or a closed-minded reluctance to embrace new discoveries.
Nevertheless, my recent light-hearted remark concerning a sartorial diet did hit the headlines, and I am more than happy to use the opportunity to discuss both the thrill and the process of scientific research.
This is a great article on the controversy, and in it you’ll also learn that “billions of neutrinos, mainly produced in the sun, are at this moment streaming through your body without you noticing.”
But don’t be alarmed. Although what you don’t notice can indeed hurt you, for instance if it’s a truck heading straight at you, a billion neutrinos apparently cannot. So keep your shorts on.