There is a lot of talk over what it will mean if Cern’s latest scientific headline-maker turns out to be real. Researchers on the Opera experiment (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) seem to have managed to send a beam of particles four hundred miles at (very slightly) faster than the speed of light. If true, it messes with our ideas of time and causality – lightspeed is the absolute speed limit of the universe. It is, according to everything we know, literally and entirely impossible for events at point A to affect events at point B unless there has been time for light to pass between the two.
Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, probably ran away with the “best quote” award when he told The Guardian: “Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered.”
The Large Hadron Collider has been busy destroying protons by the billions. But now it’s set to do something completely different: generate miniature Big Bangs.
Scientists and researchers at CERN in Geneva are gearing up to launch experiments that attempt to recreate, as accurately as possible, the conditions immediately after the Big Bang, Discovery News reports. That could shed light on a state of matter that hasn’t existed in the known Universe for over 13.7 billion years.
The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built and the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. The accelerator is located 100 m underground and runs through both French and Swiss territory. ( 27km circumference)
There is a lot of talk over what it will mean if Cern’s latest scientific headline-maker turns out to be real. Researchers on the Opera experiment (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) seem to have managed to send a beam of particles four hundred miles at (very slightly) faster than the speed of light. If true, it messes with our ideas of time and causality – lightspeed is the absolute speed limit of the universe. It is, according to everything we know, literally and entirely impossible for events at point A to affect events at point B unless there has been time for light to pass between the two.
