I
feel just a little prophetic, given that only a week ago I wrote,
“... it is also useful to simply measure as many new things as possible. History is littered with moments where we didn't bother measuring something because we knew what the result would be, only to get a big surprise whenever someone finally did measure it. So nowadays if something is measurable, then someone, somewhere, is trying to measure it.”
Well,
true to the claim, someone out there had the ridiculous idea that
measuring the speed of neutrinos was a good idea, go figure. And, lo and behold, it seems they've found something! Maybe? Who knows!
Well,
what sort of blog writer, who is a scientist (physicist even), would
I be if I didn't join in with the neutrino cacophony? So, what follows is
my attempt to say something interesting that hasn't already been said
a million times already. I will focus on why this is
such a surprising result and why this means nobody believes it.
This
disbelief has nothing to do with the quality of the experiment. The
measurement was recorded with impeccable accuracy and has been
extremely carefully analysed. Neither is the disbelief because the
result "proves Einstein wrong". It even has very little
to do with the prospect of over-turning special relativity.
The disbelief is due
to the fact that this observation brings into question the holy
principle of causality – that is, the seemingly incontrovertible
fact that cause must come before effect and not after
And,
as my former PhD supervisor, said in the Guardian today:
“If we do not have
causality, we are buggered."
