Scientists reject startling claims that the speed of light has been broken for a second time
Rejected: Claims that Albert Einstein could have been wrong over his theories on the speed of light have been dismissed by scientists
Startling claims that the speed of light has been broken for a second time have been rejected by a group of scientists.
Physicists from Cern, the Swiss home of the Large Hadron Collider, announced last week that for the second time in a matter of months they had proved Albert Einstein's theories wrong.
If true, the findings would revolutionise the world of science and change more than a century of thinking on modern physics.
However, scientists studying the same neutrino particles that their colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light have this weekend rejected their claims, saying tests had shown it must be wrong.
It was first announced in September by a team working on the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory near Rome that they had recorded the faster-than-light finding.
The scientists said they had recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.
The same team revealed last week that after running a modified follow-up test, they recorded exactly the same results as before.
However, a different team of physicists involved in ICARUS, an! experim ent also at Gran Sasso, this weekend disputed the claims.
Huge: Underground detectors at Gran Sasso in Italy which receive neutrinos beamed from CERN in Switzerland
They argue that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict the reading of their colleagues.
In a paper posted on Saturday, the ICARUS team says their findings 'refute a superluminal [faster than light] interpretation of the OPERA result.'
They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.
Astonishing: Physicists from Cern, the Swiss home of the Large Hadron Collider, pictured, announced last week that for the second time in a matter of months they had proved Einstein's theories wrong
But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles travelling at the speed of light and no more.
Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN as well as Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was 'very simple and definitive.'
Different: Scientists studying the same neutrino particles which their colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light have rejected their claims. Pictured are some neutrino particles
He said the paper asserted 'that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainl! y smalle r than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero.'
Under Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, nothing can be accelerated to a speed faster than light.
That idea lies at the heart of all current science of the cosmos and of how the vast variety of particles that make it up behave.
There was widespread skepticism when the OPERA findings were first revealed, and even the leaders of the experiment insisted that they were not announcing a discovery but simply recording measurements they had made and carefully checked.
Thenew modified experiment by OPERA researchers last week involved shorterneutrino beams from CERN and much larger gaps between them.
But those behind the experiment said it had produced the same result.
Independent scientists said, however, this was not conclusive.
Other experiments are being prepared at Fermilab and at the KEK laboratory in Japan to try to replicate OPERA's findings.
Only confirmation from one of these would open the way for a full scientific discovery to be declared.
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