Loose Wire Blamed For Faster-Than-Light Mistaken Finding

Albert Einstein is not such a dummy after all. As we previously discussed, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in making a subatomic particle go faster than the speed of light for the first time. The scientists used neutrinos, which were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second). It now turns out that it was just a loose wire that delayed the reading by a few nanoseconds — that was enough to disprove the faster than the speed of light finding. It also means the loss of a good joke

After many questioned the results, the scientists went over every inch of the experiment and found a loose connection between a timer and a computer produced a 60-nanosecond discrepancy. Someone failed to tighten the connection of a fiber optic cable to a GPS receiver (used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight) and a computer. That is all it took. That may have been a second problem with the GPS (long suspected by outside scientists) but this was enough to change the results.

When they tightened the connections and re-ran the experiment, they came up 60 nanoseconds short. That means that Einstein’s theory that the speed of light in a vacuum — approximately 186,280 miles per second, or about 700 million miles per hour — remains the absolute speed limit.

Source: Discovery