![]() ![]() But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it "a flying carpet," something that was too fantastic to be believable.ĬERN said a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 730 kilometres away in Italy travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Other outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN's claim that the neutrinos - one of the strangest well-known particles in physics - were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 299,792 kilometres per second. The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut their scientific significance. "It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that - if it's true." "It's a shock," said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately. "They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements," he said Thursday. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery. ![]() The organization, known as CERN, hosted part of the experiment, which is unrelated to the massive $10 billion Large Hadron Collider also located at the site. "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The circles marked above show the location of the underground particle accelerator rings. ![]()
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