It seems someone found out a way for it to "only appear" to travel faster than time due to the gravitational effect on time. The funny thing is, this should have been obvious thing to check early on. I mean we already know that a clock in space and an identical clock on the ground run as a different rate of time due to gravity among other things.
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Faster-than-light neutrinos face time trial
Did gravity mess with the clocks that measured particles breaking cosmic speed limit?
Eugenie Samuel Reich
Less than two weeks after the revelation that ghostly particles called neutrinos had been spotted travelling faster than the speed of light, physicists are claiming to have found flaws in the analysis that would stop the claim in its tracks.
The extraordinary result came from the OPERA experiment (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), situated 1,400 metres underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy (see 'Particles break light-speed limit'). There, scientists timed muon neutrinos arriving from CERN, Europe's particle physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, some 731 kilometres away.
They were astonished to find the neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds earlier than a light beam travelling through a vacuum would have done — breaking what physicists had thought was an immutable cosmic speed limit1.
Since the OPERA group's 22 September announcement, more than 30 papers attempting to explain the result using various exotic theoretical models have been posted to the physics preprint server at ArXiv.org. But one paper2, posted on 28 September by theorist Carlo Contaldi of Imperial College London, bears the distinction of being the first to challenge the experimental calculations.
The OPERA team timed the neutrinos using clocks at each location that were synchronized using GPS (Global Positioning System) signals from a single satellite. Contaldi's paper says the group's calculations do not take into account one aspect of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity: that slight differences in the force of gravity at the two sites would cause the clocks to tick at different rates.
Because the CERN site lies closer to the centre of the Earth than Gran Sasso, and consequently feels a smaller gravitational pull, a clock at the beginning of the neutrinos' journey would actually run at a slightly slower rate to the clock at the end. "It would reduce the significance of the result," Contaldi says.
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