The 15 November Washington Post “Health and Science” section, diverting from its usual focus on personal well-being, offers a front-page, above-the-fold commentary on physicists’ views of the recent speedy neutrino news: “Einstein, the sky is falling! Or not.”
In the online version, the main headline on this Joel Achenbach article says, “Faster-than-light neutrino poses the ultimate cosmic brain teaser for physicists.” In the paper version, the subhead says, “Physicists juggle fear and glee: Maybe everything they’ve believed is wrong.” Achenbach’s purpose is to report the fear and glee.
“It’s been an interesting and awkward autumn for physicists,” he begins. “They’ve been presented with an experimental finding that threatens to blow their vision of the universe to smithereens. A team of scientists in Europe announced in September that they’d clocked tiny particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Which is heresy.”
Achenbach explains the implications and muses on the perennial questions about how close physicists may or may not be to finding ultimate truths. He declares that “as much as [physicists] support Einstein, they’d also love for the new finding to be true,” because it would be “weirdly thrilling,” they would “get to rethink everything,” and it would be “the Full Employment Act for Physicists.”
He quotes prominent physicists:
- Brian Greene of Columbia University, known for popularizing science: “Besides my wedding day and the birth of my kids, [confirmation of the findings] would be the happiest day of my life.”
- Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, also known for popularizing science, answering the suggestion that the neutrino news is like criticizing motherhood: “Actually, it’s like saying motherhood doesn’t exist.”
- Greene again: “The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein’s hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.”
- Michael Turner of the University of Chicago: “In science we like surprises. We like big surprises. This one is too big to be true. We really like things that rock the boat and turn us in a new direction, but this one turns the boat upside down and fills it with water.”
- Lisa Randall of Harvard University, another science popularizer: Confirmation “would mean that the underlying assumptions of Einstein’s theory are not precise, they’re just approximate.”
- John Ellis of CERN: “Deep in my heart, I do not expect the faster-than-light interpretation of the ... data to survive, but one must keep an open mind.”
Achenbach’s closing also involves quotations, and is itself worth quoting:
[Ellis] sent along a quotation from the late Carl Sagan:
“We are constantly prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy.”
Sure, but Sagan had another saying: “Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for 'Science and the media.' He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
