UPDATE: Since this article was first posted, new experiments have shown that neutrinos from CERN travel subluminally. Additionally, OPERA has since identified errors in their original experiment.

I’m about to use the word neutrino a bunch of times, so I’ll start by telling you what a neutrino is.

For those of you who took Italian in high school, no, a neutrino is not a little neutron. But it is little, and electrically neutral. In fact, neutrinos are so little that they were first thought to have zero mass, like photons, but more recent discoveries revealed that this cannot be true.

Where can we find these little guys? Everywhere. Our sun pumps out neutrinos like Universal Studios does sequels to the Land Before Time. When hydrogen atoms fuse to make helium, a neutrino pops out and starts barreling toward earth at 670 million miles per hour. Each second, trillions of neutrinos tear through your body and vital organs.

Of course, you’re still sitting at your computer reading this, and you don’t seem to be too bothered despite being peppered by solar nano bullets. Thanks to neutrinos’ electrical neutrality and itty bitty stature, they have a very weak interaction with matter. They manage to fly in and around the atoms that comprise our moving parts without hitting anything while the electromagnetic and gravitational forces look the other way. So no, they can’t cause cancer.

In contrast, light can and does interact with matter all the time via the electromagnetic force, and does cause cancer. But before you start reaching for those eyepatches, closing the shades and unplugging your lamps, know that not all light is carcinogenic. For radiation to be carcinogenic, it needs to be able to interact with your individual DNA bases, which are obviously very tiny. But units of light (photons) typically interact with matter that is similar in size to its own wavelength. So yes, short-wavelength light like ultraviolet, x-rays and cosmic rays can be dangerous. But cell phones, television and wifi signals are based on radio waves, which have much longer wavelengths and are better suited to traveling long distances through our atmosphere. Talking on your phone won’t give you ear cancer, watching cartoons won’t give you eye cancer, and putting a laptop on your lap won’t give you nut tumors. Be careful with those laptops though, excess heat can still fry your sperm.

If you’re wondering why you read all that after swearing you would never look at physics again after getting your pre-med requirements out of the way, some guys just published a paper that could re-write physics as you know it, unless you never took a class on relativity, in which case physics as you know it will probably remain unchanged.

I encourage you to take a look at the paper itself, but be warned that I’d rather read this than force myself through it again. The thing has an acronym to word ratio of around 1:1, a whole page devoted to the names of young scientists clamoring to get their big shot, and it reads like all those young scientists forgot it was due until the night before. For those of you who already don’t care that much without me telling you not to, I’ll spoil the end for you and you’ll have to trust me.

You might have heard of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, the acronym is not from English) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest and best particle accelerator ever constructed, which was once feared by the mainstream media because some crackpots thought it would create a black hole and suck up the entire planet. Tons of really cool things are happening at CERN, but one of the experiments is simply producing a constant, semi-regulated stream of high energy neutrinos directed at a laboratory over 700km away in San Grasso, Italy. These neutrinos, like the ones from our sun, don’t care what they fly through, whether it be million dollar machine parts for the LHC or the Earth’s crust.

The experiment running in San Grasso is nicknamed OPERA, and it’s goal is to study neutrino oscillation, the same phenomenon that dictates that these particles must have mass. But just a few weeks ago, OPERA published a paper claiming that neutrinos were arriving in their detectors from CERN faster than the speed of light allowed. As far as we know, that’s impossible.
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News of the paper’s publishing has caused a stir of activity in the physics community and on the web. Articles like this one are popping up all over search results, and scientists are rushing to be the first to either experimentally disprove or validate the findings.

The authors’ experimental premise was shaky at best (pardon the premature pun). Light speed experiments depend heavily on precise distance and time measurements. Without diving too deeply into relativity, a subject in which my own undergraduate education was lacking, the main issue is calibrating the time difference between different points on the Earth’s surface. Because our planet’s motion in space is extremely complicated (we rotate on an axis, revolve around the sun, which revolves around the center of the galaxy which is accelerating away from the center of the universe), and because the gravitational field is not constant on the Earth’s surface (for a few reasons, altitude being the most clear), observers at different coordinates cannot accurately compare time lapses. Time flows at (slightly) different rates at different locations on the Earth’s surface. This effect is exacerbated when objects (like neutrinos or photons or cars) move across our planet’s non-constant gravitational field, especially when that motion covers altitude and latitude changes (the Earth’s observed tangential acceleration changes with distance to its axis).

Historically, to circumvent this problem in relativity, experimenters have placed both transmitter and receiver in light speed experiments in the same spot. If there’s no displacement, there’s no problem in figuring out the difference between observers at the start and finish.

The OPERA experiment’s receiver, like I said earlier, is located in San Grasso, Italy, and the neutrinos are being emitted from a CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland. According to the paper, the distance between detector and emitter is about 730km (as the worm tunnels, not as the bird flies). To account for relativistic differences between these two locations, a complicated integral needs to be performed along the path that the neutrinos take from emitter to receiver that accounts for all of the effects discussed earlier. To attempt this integral, the experiments physically transported a clock from A to B.

There are many problems with this set up, which have been terrifically explained in this letter published not long after the original paper. The authors made no mention of how the clock was transported, a huge omission when you consider the difference in path taken by a car or airplane. But either case introduces an error to the result – neutrinos travel along a straight line path from emitter to detector, underground, and not above the Earth’s surface. The acceleration of the mode of transport (starting and stopping at red lights, etc.) becomes just one more thing that needs to be accounted for in the path integral.

Even if these time effects were all correctly accounted for, the distance between detectors must also have been precisely measured. Such a measurement relies heavily on GPS technology, something that itself depends on relativity to properly function- the same theory that their result directly violates. To further complicate things, an earthquake occurred while this distance measurement was being taken that noticeably changed the distance between the two points! Rather than starting over, the authors included this earthquake data in their discussion.

Draw a squiggly line on a piece of paper. Is there anyway you can bend that paper so that the distance between start point and end point is greater than the total length measured along the line? No. There are no three-dimension shortcuts through 4D space, either (though the reverse is certainly true). But some people have suggested this as an explanation of the OPERA result. Unfortunately, the term ‘extra dimensions’ gets tossed around a lot next to high profile results like these, and it’s usually in error.

So why shouldn’t you care about this paper, besides the fact that you already don’t? Because it’s wrong. The internet has been flooded with papers detailing errors in the paper and why these results are inconsistent with theories of superluminal motion. Theoretical physicists have predicted that such neutrinos would lose energy rapidly en route, a phenomenon that was not at all detected by the OPERA experiment.

There aren’t many things in this universe that I am sure about, but the light speed limit is one of them.