On 22 September the paper “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam” was submitted to arXiv.org. It reports an “experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory [that] has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km.” The key line states: “An early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum of (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns was measured.” The paper’s final paragraph stipulates:
Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results.
The next morning, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported this news in staff-written articles that made the interior pages of the on-paper editions. The Wall Street Journal posted a wire-service article.
Dennis Overbye wrote the Times piece, which began:
Roll over, Einstein?
The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit—the speed of light—that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905.
If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous.
Even before the European physicists had presented their results ... a chorus of physicists had risen up on blogs and elsewhere arguing that it was way too soon to give up on Einstein and that there was probably some experimental error. Incredible claims require incredible evidence.
Overbye explains that the neutrinos came from “a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 0.0025 percent.” He refers to the CERN theorist John Ellis as having “published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos” and then quotes Ellis’s skeptical caution: “These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment.”
The Washington Post has a wire-service article on its home page, a staff-written article on an inside page but apparently not yet available online, a Joel Achenbach blog posting and, on the editorial page in the on-paper edition, a copy of Alexandra Petri’s humor blog posting.
The Petri humor piece carries the headline “Prof. Einstein, call your office.” Here’s an excerpt:
I know. Something exceeds the speed limit in Italy, and somehow this is news?
If true, this is huge. The idea that the speed of light is a constant, never to be exceeded, has been fixed since the time of Albert Einstein.
It’s one of those operating assumptions that underlie our every action, like “single men with cats are bad marriage material” or “if TV critics praise a show for being fresh, funny and insightful, it will fail.”
And if this isn’t true, nothing is true—all the rules on which I’ve based my existence: “Christmas calories don’t count,” “the Orioles will lose,” “if you like a product or service, inevitably they will change it, start charging you more, or George Lucas will add new scenes and special features.” Up is up, down is down, right is whatever position Ron Paul currently occupies, and the speed of light cannot be broken.
This is so huge that the Europeans are asking us to check it. They haven’t done that since the rise of the Third Reich.
Back now to Overbye. He also quotes Alvaro de Rujula, another CERN theorist: “Flabbergasting.”
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 published in '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.
