October 2, 2011

Einstein's Theory: a Little More Relative Than We Thought

5 Minutes With a Physics Professor on the New Meaning of E=mc² 1

U. of Minnesota

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close 5 Minutes With a Physics Professor on the New Meaning of E=mc² 1

U. of Minnesota

By Paul Basken

E=mc2, arguably the world's best-known scientific equation, may have suffered a mortal blow last month at the hands of European researchers. The scientists, based at CERN, the main European high-energy physics laboratory, in Switzerland, shot a beam of neutrinos that traveled underground, faster than the speed of light, to their detector in Italy. That had been considered impossible, of course; Albert Einstein's iconic formula has long decreed that any matter moving faster than the