The Galileo Galilei Institute (GGI) hosts workshops in theoretical particle physics (in a building overlooking the beautiful landscape of tuscan hills, photo). Last week, I have co-organized an event, the Dark Workshop, to discuss the present status and future lines of research of Dark Energy and Dark Matter. Thank you to all speakers and organizers! All presentations can be found on the workshop website
When your non-physicists friends start to send emails with links to headlines of big newspapers (usually titled ‘Einstein was wrong’: that’s apparently the best the average reporter can come up with) it means something potentially interesting is happening. In fact, after days of rumors, the results of the Opera experiment have been announced
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
And they are frankly bizarre. Ready? Neutrinos (in this specific case those fired from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratories) seem to travel faster than the speed of light, therefore violating one of the pillars of modern physics. Now, the members of the Opera collaboration themselves are very cautious. Before throwing away our theories, let’s see if other experiments are able to reproduce this result.
When your non-physicists friends start to send you links to big newspapers’ headlines reporting important physics results (usually titled ‘Einstein was wrong’: it’s been like that for almost a century now, it is apparently the best an average reporter can come up with) it means that something potentially important is happening. After days of rumors, the results of the Opera experiment have been finally released
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
and they are frankly bizarre. Ready? Neutrinos go faster than the speed of light! My first reaction is ‘this is too odd to be true’, and in fact the members of the Opera themselves are very cautious.Let’s wait and see whether other experiments confirm or disprove these findings.