...plus minus a few statistical variances in the below .5 nanosecond range...
That was the bottom line of the webcast, that a lead scientist of the OPERA neutrino time measurement experiment gave today at 1600 central European time. That is the statistically gathered timeframe by how much the speed measurement of 16000 neutrino events exceeded the speed of light over a distance of 730 km that these neutrinos traveled!
The offical CERN press release can be found here.
The above webcast can be accessed here.
This probably doesn't mean much to alot of us... but to the few science oriented of us here... this is ground breaking news...
For me it was ground breaking enough to watch the entire 1 and half hour webcast, during which the lead scientist of the project explained all details of the measurement process, and in the final half an hour answered some of the viewers' questions.
Ground breaking, because, if this result gets validated again by an independent team, the world of science as we have known and understood it, will change forever! Because, what was considered to be one of the few absolute laws of the universe: light speed being the highest possible speed in the cosmos - will no more be a law.
Sure, 2.4 nanoseconds sounds like a diminishingly small time frame to most of us!
But on the level of particle physics, at the level of single unified quants being the basic unit of measurement, these 2.4 ns have the potential of changing an entire science: Einstein's famed formulas correlating mass and time fluctuation in the approach to c velocity would then become defunct! Mind you, these formulas defined our understanding of the cosmos. If these formulas loose their functionality in regular space-time...we are going to be forced to rethink physics and the universe as we know it.
