So, the day after news broke of a possible revolution in physics – particles moving faster than light – a scientist leading the European experiment that made the discovery calmly explained it to a standing-room-only crowd at CERN, the giant particle accelerator straddling the Swiss-French border.
The physicist, Dario Auterio, made no sweeping claims.
He did not try to explain what the results might mean for the laws of physics, let alone the broader world.
After an hour of technical talk, he simply said, ‘Therefore, we present to you today this discrepancy, this anomaly.’
But what an anomaly it may be. From 2009 through 2011, the massive OPERA detector buried in a mountain in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded subatomic particles called neutrinos generated at CERN arriving a smidgen early, faster than light can move in a vacuum. If confirmed, the finding would throw more than a century of physics into chaos.
‘If it’s correct, it’s phenomenal,’ said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois. ‘We’d be looking at a whole new set of rules for how the universe works.’
Those rules would bend, or possibly break, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, published in 1905. Radical at the time, the theory tied together space and time, matter and energy, and set a hard limit for the speed of light, later measured to be about 186,000 miles per second.
No experiment in 106 years had broken that speed limit. The Washington Post online article 23rd September 2011, ‘Particles Faster than Light: Revolution or Mistake?’
The heart of CERN is the Large Hadron Collider, a ten billion dollar, seventeen-mile-long particle accelerator. It is quite possibly the most sophisticated instrument ever built. Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s1e8: What Are We Really Made Of? Science 2010
I’m a realist. I realise that perhaps we will find nothing. That could create a crisis in Physics. It could stagnate all of Physics if our machines are not powerful enough to unveil the next act, the next curtain where we look at the next stage of matter and energy. Professor Michio Kakiu
The earliest moments of the universe could soon be revealed. This is the Cern laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the large Hadron Collider. The largest experiment ever built. Deep below ground researchers hope to recreate conditions that existed just after the Big Bang to reveal how everything around us came into being. Hawking’s Universe, PBS 1997
At Cern near Geneva in Switzerland ... The Large Hadron Collider works by firing sub-atomic particles in opposite directions around a sixteen-mile tunnel. They hit each other at nearly the speed of light. The energies involved replicate the conditions that were around in the early universe. Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe, Channel 4 2008
Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics.
Researchers failed to find evidence of so-called ‘supersymmetric’ particles, which many physicists had hoped would plug holes in the current theory. BBC online article 27th August 2011, ‘LHC results tut supersymmetry theory on the spot’
‘The Large Hadron Collider – the biggest machine ever built by human beings – is finally going to turn on.’ Storyville: Particle Fever – The Hunt for the Higgs Boson, David Kaplan, BBC 2014
‘10,000 people. Over a 100 nationalities.’ ibid.
‘The Higgs is unlike any other particle – it’s the lynchpin of the standard model.’ ibid.
‘We have observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 +- 0.6 GEV at 4.9 significance!’ ibid. lecturer