In science, revolutions take time. Eureka moments can stretch into noggin-scratching years.
And so, the day after news broke of a possible revolution in physics — particles moving faster than light, violating Einstein’s ultimate speed limit — 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 Friday, he said, “Therefore we present to you today this discrepancy, this anomaly.”
But what an anomaly it might be. From 2009 through 2011, the massive OPERA detector buried in a mountain in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded particles called neutrinos generated at CERN arriving a smidge too soon, faster than light can move in a vacuum. If the finding is confirmed by further experiments, it would throw more than a century of physics into chaos.
“We spent six months in various cross-checks,” Auterio said of the team of 160 physicists from 11 countries collaborating on the OPERA experiment, which is funded by the French and Italian governments.
Starting with GPS measurements, then upgrading the readings by sophisticated means, they measured the distance traveled — about 454 miles — to within 8 inches. They factored in the rotation of the Earth, which moves ever so slightly in the flash it takes neutrinos to zoom to the detector. They even stopped traffic in a tunnel running through Gran Sasso mountain to calibrate their instruments.
An audience member asked whether the team accounted for the tugging of the moon on the Earth.
“We took data continuously over three years, so this movement should average out,” Auterio said.
His explanations satisfied prominent spectators.
“I want to congratulate you on a beautiful experiment,” said Samuel C.C. Ting, the Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was sitting in the second row of the auditorium. “The experiment is very carefully done, the systematic error very carefully checked.”
Still, some yet-unknown error could invalidate the results.
“This is one of those ‘devil in the details’ things,” said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, the U.S. Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois.
Fermilab operates a similar experiment, called MINOS, that shoots neutrinos from Illinois to an underground detector in Minnesota. In 2007, MINOS sniffed a hint of faster-than-light neutrinos, but the margin of error was too big to “make a claim,” Plunkett said.
Fermilab scientists will now reanalyze their data, which will take six to eight months.
