Last week, it was all over in the news. It did manage to grab a lot of eyeballs, simply because
something seemed to have challenged the celebrated E=mc2! Though intricate and baffling, it did give me a reason to come up with my next blog. And I am more than happy about it.
So, the episode panned out like this: CERN physicists were firing neutrinos from a particle accelerator n Geneva down a 1km beam line in towards the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. The aim was to test the frequency of oscillations and to measure neutrino velocity to a greater accuracy. At Gran Sasso, a detector instrument called OPERA measured the neutrinos. Methodically, the speed of neutrinos is measured and compared to the speed of light by subtracting the expected time for light o travel the distance from the time for the neutrinos to travel the same distance. Surprisingly, the journal article ‘CERN neutrinos to Gran Sasso’ recorded this figure as a positive value of 60.7 nanoseconds. Stunning indeed! And may be, a path breaking revelation.
