Errors Reportedly Identified in “Faster than Light” Particle Experiment

UPDATE: February 23, 2012, 7:49 AM ET: CERN has issued a statement acknowledging two possible sources of error identified by the experimental team.

UPDATE: February 22, 2012, 7:18 PM ET: Eugenie Samuel Reich provides additional information on Nature’s newsblog, writing that the experimenters have identified two possible sources of error. The second has to do with possible errors in the time stamping associated with neutrino-travel events in the experiment.

In September, researchers announced that they measured particles known as neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light from the CERN accelerator in Switzerland to the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy. Reported in Inside Science News Service and many other news outlets around the world, the researchers said they announced the results to get the help of the international scientific community in evaluating whether there were any problems with the experiment. Now, a blog on the website of the journal Science is reporting that a source from within the research group has identified a problem in their experiment that may have led to spurious results: a faulty fiber optic cable connection between a computer used in the experiment and a GPS unit involved in measuring the velocity of the neutrinos.

If this error is confirmed, the speed of light would reign supreme as the ultimate speed limit of the universe to the best of our knowledge.