by EUGENIE SAMUEL REICH
The joke begins with the barman saying: “I’m sorry, we don’t serve neutrinos.” Then the punch line: a neutrino walks into a bar.
Such causality-bending humour has been rife on the Internet in the past week, following the news that an experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila, Italy, has apparently clocked neutrinos exceeding the speed of light as they travelled 730 kilometres from their source at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
The finding by the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus) collaboration, released on 22 September, has the media abuzz with talk of a century’s worth of physics upended, starting with Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This sets the velocity of light as the inviolable and unattainable limit for matter in motion, and links it to deeper aspects of reality, such as causality.
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