Physicists Say Speed-of-Light-Breaking Neutrinos Would've Lost Their Energy Along the Way

Monday, October 3, 2011 - 15:00 in Physics & Chemistry

Another day, another wrinkle in the year's biggest physics story Last week's bombshell physics news--those superluminal neutrinos that CERN's OPERA experiment clocked moving faster than the speed of light--are already getting the rigorous vetting that OPERA's researchers were hoping for. And some physicists are already rejecting the notion that CERN's neutrinos broke the cosmic speed limit outright. A paper posted late last week, titled "New Constraints on Neutrino Velocities," argues that any particle traveling faster than light would shed a great deal of their energy along the way. And since that didn't happen, those neutrinos couldn't have traveled faster than light. Case closed. So let's go a little deeper here. The physicists behind this assessment, Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow of Boston University (Glashow has a Nobel under his belt, so these are no middling minds), ignore the debate over whether or not it's possible for a fundamental particle to outpace the speed...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net