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This week we will read this news article about:

The Opera Neutrino Superluminal Travel

Below is a figure of the experiment. Neutrinos are produced at the CERN lab in Geneva. They zip through the Earth and arrive at the OPERA detector in Italy. They know the distance between the two labs very well. By dividing the distance by the time, they can figure out the speed of the neutrinos - simple right?

The hypothesis is that neutrinos move at the speed of light, and this measurement was going to test this idea, the results were surprising, originally.

The Scientific Process

This is a huge claim: Einstein's theory of special relativity (this weeks topic) says that the speed of light is the fastest you can go. In typical science fashion, more tests were called for. In order to test whether the anomaly was correct, two things needed to be done:

• Do another completely independent measurement of the same thing. This is to duplicate results and eliminate the possibilities of unknown systematic errors related to the particular set-up used in the OPERA experiment.
• Triple check and recheck everything...

As it turns out they did the second one before another experiment was set-up and they found this

Here is the breaking news about the error. Good thing science is never satisfied with just one measurement.