That killjoy Einstein wins again.īut if the OPERA saga did tell us anything, it’s that the idea of travelling faster than light continues to capture the imagination. The culprit: a faulty cable connection in the GPS system used to time the neutrinos along their journey. Unfortunately, the euphoria was premature: the OPERA results were incorrect, thanks to a calibration error. So the OPERA announcement was bound to generate excitement, even if the neutrinos in question were only moving nanoseconds faster than light – hardly sufficient to outrun the Cylons, but nevertheless faster than c, the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein back in 1905. It takes years, decades, centuries even to cross the vast expanses of space with our current propulsion technology – a realistic depiction of the tedium of space travel in entertainment would likely elicit the viewer equivalent of “Are we there yet?” After all, the prospect of faster-than-light (FTL) travel has been a science fiction staple for decades, from wormholes and Star Trek’s original warp drive, to the FTL “jumps” used to evade the Cylons in SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica reboot. The news even briefly overshadowed the far more recognizable Large Hadron Collider’s ongoing hunt for the Higgs boson.ĭespite careful hedging by scientists, the popular imagination jumped right from neutrinos to a viable spacecraft for fast interstellar travel. Last summer, a small neutrino experiment in Europe called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus) stunned the world with a preliminary announcement that it had clocked neutrinos travelling just a few fractions of a second faster than the speed of light. "It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off."
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