text: By Adrian Cho, ScienceNOW 
   
   If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light. 
   
   In fact, the result would be so revolutionary that it’s sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. “I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments,” says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, “I’d be delighted if it were true.” 
   
   The data come from a 1,300-metric-ton particle detector named Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA). Lurking in Italy’s subterranean Gran Sasso National Laboratory, OPERA detects neutrinos that are fired through the Earth from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. As the particles hardly interact at all with other matter, they stream right through the ground, with only a very few striking the material in the detector and making a noticeable shower of particles. 
   
   Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds. 
   
   However, even Ereditato says it’s way too early to declare relativity wrong. “I would never say that,” he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. “We are forced to say something,” he says. “We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.” The results will be presented at a seminar tomorrow at CERN. 
   
   The big question is whether OPERA researchers have discovered particles going faster than light, or whether they have been misled by an unidentified “systematic error” in their experiment that’s making the time look artificially short. Chang Kee Jung, a neutrino physicist at Stony Brook University in New York, says he’d wager that the result is the product of a systematic error. “I wouldn’t bet my wife and kids because they’d get mad,” he says. “But I’d bet my house.” 
   
   Jung, who is spokesperson for a similar experiment in Japan called T2K, says the tricky part is accurately measuring the time between when the neutrinos are born by slamming a burst of protons into a solid target and when they actually reach the detector. That timing relies on the global positioning system, and the GPS measurements can have uncertainties of tens of nanoseconds. “I would be very interested in how they got a 10-nanosecond uncertainty, because from the systematics of GPS and the electronics, I think that’s a very hard number to get.” 
   
   No previous measurements obviously rule out the result, says Kostelecky, who has spent 25 years developing a theory, called the standard model extension, that accounts for all possible types of violations of special relativity in the context of particle physics. “If you had told me that there was a claim of faster-than-light electrons, I would be a lot more skeptical,” he says. The possibilities for neutrinos are less constrained by previous measurements, he says. 
   
   Still, Kostelecky repeats the old adage: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Even Ereditato says that one measurement does not extraordinary evidence make. 
   
   This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science. 
   
   Image: OPERA experiment ||||| A pillar of physics _ that nothing can go faster than the speed of light _ appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein's theories. 
   
   FILE - In this Tuesday, March 30, 2010 file photo, the globe of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, is illuminated outside Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists at CERN, the world's largest... (Associated Press) 
   
   This undated file photo shows famed physicist Albert Einstein. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the world's largest physics lab, say they have clocked subatomic particles,... (Associated Press) 
   
   FILE - In this Dec. 28, 1934 file photo, Albert Einstein delivers a lecture at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the auditorium of the Carnegie Institue of Technology... (Associated Press) 
   
   Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. That's something that according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity _ the famous E (equals) mc2 equation _ just doesn't happen. 
   
   "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The organization, known as CERN, hosted part of the experiment, which is unrelated to the massive $10 billion Large Hadron Collider also located at the site. 
   
   Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery. 
   
   "They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements," he said Thursday. 
   
   Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately. 
   
   "It's a shock," said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. "It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that _ if it's true." 
   
   The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance. 
   
   Other outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN's claim that the neutrinos _ one of the strangest well-known particles in physics _ were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second). 
   
   University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it "a flying carpet," something that was too fantastic to be believable. 
   
   CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment. 
   
   "We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement," said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA. 
   
   The researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results. 
   
   A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN. 
   
   Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country's devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami. 
   
   Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature. 
   
   Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now." 
   
   He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar results weren't detected before. 
   
   "This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully," said Ellis. ||||| Image caption Enormous underground detectors are needed to catch neutrinos, that are so elusive as to be dubbed "ghost particles" 
   
   A meeting at Cern, the world's largest physics lab, has addressed results that suggest subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light. 
   
   The team has published its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes. 
   
   If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science may come tumbling down. 
   
   Antonio Ereditato added "words of caution" to his Cern presentation because of the "potentially great impact on physics" of the result. 
   
   The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it. 
   
   We want to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy Antonio Ereditato, Opera collaboration Light speed: Flying into fantasy 
   
   Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit. 
   
   "We tried to find all possible explanations for this," the report's author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening. 
   
   "We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't. 
   
   "When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'." 
   
   Friday's meeting was designed to begin this process, with hopes that other scientists will find inconsistencies in the measurements and, hopefully, repeat the experiment elsewhere. 
   
   "Despite the large [statistical] significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects," Dr Ereditato told the meeting. 
   
   "We look forward to independent measurement from other experiments." 
   
   Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another. 
   
   The Cern team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, and sends them through the Earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos. 
   
   In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second earlier than they would have done if they had travelled at the speed of light. 
   
   This is a tiny fractional change - just 20 parts in a million - but one that occurs consistently. 
   
   The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 16,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery. 
   
   Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Professor Antonio Ereditato of Cern: "An understatement that these are unexpected results" 
   
   But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit. 
   
   That has motivated them to publish their measurements. 
   
   "My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato told BBC News. 
   
   But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".
target: – It's enough to make Einstein's hair stand up: Physicists at CERN think they've spotted neutrinos traveling faster than light, reports AP. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity—his E=MC2 equation—nothing should be able to go that fast. At Wired, Adrian Cho doesn't mince words: "If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century." It's so jarring in the world of science—the BBC explains that modern physics depends on the notion that the "the speed of light is the universe's ultimate speed limit"—that the researchers themselves are asking other scientists to try to duplicate the findings before proclaiming them to be true. "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," says a CERN spokesman. Chicago's Fermilab says it will begin its own experiments immediately.