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