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"Faster than Light" Particles Threaten Einstein

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CERN, also home to the Large Hadron Collider that is probing how the universe began and developed, said measurements over three years had shown invisible neutrino particles covering the 730 km to a laboratory in Italy 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- faster than light.

That reading could show that Albert Einstein, father of modern physics, was wrong when he laid down in his 1905 theory of special relativity that the speed of light was a "cosmic constant", and nothing could go faster.

CORNERSTONE OF SCIENCE

That principle, and Einstein's later general relativity theory, which expanded it into wider fields of physics, have been cornerstones of scientific views of the cosmos and how it works ever since.

The new finding was recorded when 15,000 neutrino beams were pumped over three years from CERN to an underground Italian laboratory at Gran Sasso near Rome.

Physicists on the experiment, called OPERA after the initials of its formal scientific title, say they had checked and rechecked over many months anything that could have produced a misreading before announcing what they had found.

Professor Jenny Thomas, who works on neutrinos at Fermilab, the U.S. physics research centre near Chicago, commented: "The impact of this measurement, were it to be correct, would be huge."

OPERA's Dario Auterio, presenting the findings to a packed and clearly sceptical auditorium at CERN on Friday, said they were of "high statistical accuracy" and could not be explained by extraneous effects such as seismic tremors or moon phases.

He declined to get into theoretical interpretations and told his audience of largely CERN scientists that other research centres -- Fermilab and probably Japan's T2K neutrino research team -- must now take up the baton.

"In science, you can never be sure. Something odd can always happen, however careful you are," said CERN spokesman James Gillies. "You've always got to get an independent result from someone else before you can say it's a discovery."

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http://www.bdnews24.com/details.php?id=206934&cid=8
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

Well, it may take a long time to be sure and i'm not really sure how much of impact that will make in the field of future scientific research & achievements of mankind, if it really is proven and accepted some time. But one thing will be established once more; There will always be more to what we think to be absolute / Ultimate knowledge.

The creator knows all of it, who created this universe. We are just reading his creation to learn... & it never ends. Thanks to the scientists of all time; for unveiling the knowledge of His creation to the laymans like me ..