Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern (the home of the Large Hadron Collider) in Geneva toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second earlier than light would have.
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It’s like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn”
Prof Matt Strassler
Rutgers University
The speed of light is widely regarded as the Universe’s ultimate velocity limit. Outlined first by James Clerk Maxwell and then by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity, much of modern physics relies on the idea that nothing can travel faster than light.
For many, the most comforting explanation is that some repeated “systematic error” has so far eluded the experimenters.
Since September, more than 80 scientific papers about the finding have been posted to the arXiv pre-print server. Most propose theoretical solutions for the observation; a few claim to find problems.