If the speed of light is a constant in the universe, as Albert Einstein famously predicted, then so is this: Researchers always will try to prove Einstein was wrong.
The latest in a long line of challengers: scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Last week they startled physicists around the world — and a few nonphysicists, too — by declaring they had recorded subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Not by much: 60 billionths of a second.
But a cornerstone of Einsteinian theory is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, about 186,000 miles a second.
If that is wrong, and something can outstrip light speed, then 100-plus years of physics — everything from the subatomic to theories of how the universe evolved — suddenly is up for revision. The universe doesn’t work the way we thought it did. We don’t really know what we thought we knew.
“It would be amazing, everyone would be jumping up and down like crazy,” Cal Tech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll told us. “It would certainly be the most surprising discovery in the last 100 years.”
Reality check: The CERN experimenters are probably wrong. These experiments are exceedingly difficult to perform and precision often eludes researchers. “There is a chance that they’re right, but a very small chance,” Carroll said.
The CERN team is cautious about its claim. “The finding is so startling that, for the moment, everybody should be very prudent,” a CERN spokesman said, tiptoeing past a graveyard full of scientists who thought they’d invented cold fusion or found the cure for cancer or … proved Einstein wrong.
But we’re rooting for CERN on this one.
No, that’s not a dis of Einstein. But if it turns out that one of his most enduring pillars — the speed of light — is just a little off, then it will fire another generation of Einstein-wannabes to seek the truth out there. The universe is even more inscrutable than we thought.
Most thrilling: Time travel might be possible. (Carroll’s clever blog headline: “Can Neutrinos Kill Their Own Grandfathers?”)
We live in a world created by Einstein. Nuclear energy and the atom bomb. Lasers, global positioning systems, telescopes and scanners that peer into the human body. All because of Einstein’s theories.
But Einstein wasn’t always right.
He toiled for years on a “unified theory” that would unite all of physics, a primer for how the universe really works. He never finished it.
The universe defies the most brilliant scientific researchers every day. It yields tantalizing bits of information. But mostly it feints. Dodges. Misleads. And withholds so much more. That’s true for the mysteries of the cosmos and the more terrestrial riddles of the human heart.
That is the only constant in the cosmos, guaranteed to never change.
