GENEVA: Einstein may have been right after all. European researchers said on Friday they had measured again the speed of a subatomic particle that a September experiment suggested traveled faster than the speed of light, violating Einstein's special theory of relativity, whichunderlies much of modern physics.
The research team, led by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia, found that the particles, neutrinos, do not travel faster than light. Rubbia's team, called 'Icarus' , measured the speed of neutrinos fired from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland, to a detector 453 miles away in Italy.
"The results are very convincing ," Rubbia said, "and they tell us essentially that there was something not quite right with the results of Opera ." Opera was the team which reported in Sept that its tests appeared to show neutrinos speeding faster than light, prompting widespread disbelief among scientists.
Einstein's theory of relativity , a pillar of modern physics , says nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, approximately 186,282 miles per second. That speed factors into all kinds of calculations, from estimates about the size and age of the universe to the radius of black holes. Doubts about Opera results were heightened last month when researchers said they had found a flaw in the technical setup that could have distorted the experiment's figures.
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