A recent experiment at CERN, the giant particle accelerator near Geneva, seem to attack one of physics’ sacred cows: Albert Einstein’s postulate that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In the experiment, physicists saw that streams of neutrinos — tiny, ghostly particles which seldom interact with other matter — were travelling just above the speed of light. But this is impossible if Einstein’s theory of relativity is correct. So was Einstein wrong? Einstein’s near-mythic fame rests on his theory of relativity, which says that the speed of light in a vacuum, approximately 186,282 miles per second, is the ultimate speed limit. Nothing in the universe can travel faster. In the CERN experiment, physicists fired a beam of neutrinos towards a detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, 454 miles away. Using highly sophisticated equipment, the CERN physicists tracked some 15,000 neutrinos over a period of three years. The neutrinos seemed to be reaching the detector 60 nanosecon...
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