When it was fixed - and its mistaken readings scrubbed from the data - the 60-nanosecond difference disappeared. Today, the CERN team announced that the GPS system used to adjust the mechanism that timed the neutrinos’ journey had a loose fiber optic cable.

( PHOTOS: Inside the Large Hadron Collider) Just last weekend, reports the science site Ars Technica, no fewer than five different teams at the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) announced that they were gearing up to run tests of their own. To their credit, they invited physicists all over the world to try to replicate their findings, and many got to work. Things heated up even more when the researchers reported that, yes, they had checked their instruments and calculations before going public and no, they saw no flaws. In this case, what the experiment would have changed is the very foundation of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which is itself the foundation of more than a century of physics, and fundamental to our entire understanding of the universe. But being a little faster than light is like being a little dead even a tiny bit changes everything. 0025% of the time it would have taken a light beam to make the trip. ( MORE: Was Einstein Wrong? A Faster-Than-Light Neutrino May Be Saying Yes)īut according to the Apennine receivers, the neutrinos did go faster - not by much, just by 60 nanoseconds, or. Since the mountain might as well not have been there, the neutrinos should have moved at the speed of light the entire way - no slower, and definitely no faster, since, as Albert Einstein pointed out, nothing in the universe can do that.

The universe was first endangered back in September, when a group of CERN physicists fired a swarm of neutrinos - ghostly particles that don’t give a fig about objects in their path-through a mountain to a receiver beneath Italy’s Apennine Mountains, located 450 miles (724 km) away. The instrument of its salvation, and that of the very edifice of physics itself? A fiber-optic cable in a GPS receiver at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) near Geneva. Follow universe as we know it was saved today.

Neutrinos faster than light