ASTONISHED scientists are in complete shock after they apparently blew apart one of the basic laws of physics. Researchers say they have recorded particles travelling faster than the speed of light – something that was understood to be impossible. Subatomic particles were beamed from the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva towards a lab 450 miles away in Italy and they arrived a fraction of a second quicker than they should have.
Lead researcher Dr Antonio Ereditato has labelled the results as “crazy” because Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity – which has been the basis of physics for a century – depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum.
The LHC team has now published its findings after repeating the experiment thousands of times. Dr Ereditato said: “We tried to find all possible explanations for this. We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects. And we didn’t.”He said the consequences could be “very serious” and added: “My dream would be that another independent experiment finds the same thing.”