The latest confirmation brings them one step closer to shaking the very foundation of modern physics — Albert Einstein's 1905 Special theory of Relativity that states nothing can travel faster than light.
If the results announced two months ago shocked and stunned scientists all over the world, a sense of disbelief has set in after the team of scientists reconfirmed the results last Friday.
The experiment involved generating proton pulses and measuring the time taken for the neutrinos to travel 730 km from CERN, Europe's particle physics lab near Geneva to Gran Sasso National laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy. The 730 km distance between the two points has been measured with an error margin of just 20 cm.
A beam of light would take just 2.4 milliseconds to cover this distance. But in March 2011 scientists were shocked to discover that neutrinos travelled 60 nanoseconds (or 60 billionths of a second) faster than light.
This means that neutrinos were travelling at a speed of 299,798,454 metres per second, while the speed of light in a vacuum is slower at 299,792,458 metres per second.
If the results announced two months ago shocked and stunned scientists all over the world, a sense of disbelief has set in after the team of scientists reconfirmed the results last Friday.
The experiment involved generating proton pulses and measuring the time taken for the neutrinos to travel 730 km from CERN, Europe's particle physics lab near Geneva to Gran Sasso National laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy. The 730 km distance between the two points has been measured with an error margin of just 20 cm.
A beam of light would take just 2.4 milliseconds to cover this distance. But in March 2011 scientists were shocked to discover that neutrinos travelled 60 nanoseconds (or 60 billionths of a second) faster than light.
This means that neutrinos were travelling at a speed of 299,798,454 metres per second, while the speed of light in a vacuum is slower at 299,792,458 metres per second.
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