Neutrinos and the Speed of Light

Adria D. Venialgo Báez

In Physics II we have been talking about light. We know that light can behave sometimes as a particle and sometimes as a wave. We also know that the speed of light can be determined both in vacuum as when it is traveling through another medium, like glass or another materials. Since Albert Einstein has establish his theory of relativity in 1905 with his famous equation E=mc², it has been determined that there is no particle in the Universe that can travel faster than light does. But recently scientists have been talking about some kind of particle which can change the history of physics and indeed, we may be witnesses of a very transcendental moment in history related to these theories of relativity.

On September 15, 2011 the scientific leader of the project OPERA of the Large Hadron Collider, Antonio Ereditato, gave the results of an experiment that he and a very large team of other scientists have been doing. These results were so stunning that they had to do it 15,000 times giving always the same number; a particle known as neutrino can travel 60 nanoseconds faster than light.  To know more about neutrinos, they are a kind of subatomic particle without charge with ½ spin. It has mass but very small and hard do measure. It is said that it weighs less than 5.5 eV/c². Its interaction with other particles is too small so they travel through matter without disturbing it. The existence of the neutrino was on 1930 by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and on 1956 the physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines has demonstrated by experiment. With the “neutrino experiment” a beam of 1018 neutrons was bombarding pure water. It have been made experiments to determine the velocity at which they travel and they made an important discovery that would put into question the veracity of the theories of relativity proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905. After repeat the same experiment over 15,000 times it has been found that neutrinos travel 60 nanoseconds faster than light.

Only this project OPERA have been doing this experiment so they announced their findings and proposed to another scientists around the world to make the same experiment to confirm the results because if there right, it will be an important advancement in the area of physics. We will probably been facing the born of new questions about relativity and theories than could explain this new phenomena. Physicists will have to explain why these kind of particles can travel faster than light and how they do it, how is that they were not been discovered until now and if there are other particles in the world than could have this same behavior. They have to investigate if there is a connection between neutrinos, black matter, the origin of the Universe and the actual laws of Physics or if there has to be more information that we do not know yet to explain the world in where we are living. Maybe we are about to begin a new era of physics in which scientist will discover more about our cosmos, about time and space.