The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. "We are shocked," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and OPERA's spokesman. The 1,800-tonne OPERA detector is a complex array of electronics and photographic emulsion plates, but the new result is simple-the neutrinos are arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light allows. But they are all around us-the sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. It is designed to study a beam of neutrinos coming from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory located 730 kilometers away near Geneva, Switzerland. The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 meters underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics-that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second. An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light.
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