I have been getting a lot of questions about my previous posts on my Facebook profile (the ones that reference a recent deviation that I posted here. I'm no theoretical physicist so I will not go into a great deal of detail about the ins and outs of Relativity. You can learn more at the Encyclopædia Brittannica's web site.

Albert Einstein (Are you familiar with him? He's the guy that came up with E=mc^2. More on that in a moment) discovered the concept of relativity. Relativity is broken down to two parts. The first being general relativity and the other special relativity. These are then further broken down. Relativity provides the basis for understanding cosmic processes and the geometry of the universe itself. (Britannica, 2011 Relativity) Simply put it is the foundation upon which our understanding of physics itself is built. Special relativity among other things reveals that the speed of light is the speed is an asymptote as far as matter is concerned. This same theory is also responsible to the famous equation E=mc^2 where E is kinetic energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. The relativistic mass of an object becomes infinite as the body approaches the speed of light (c). Simply put: any body of matter can approach but never reach the speed of light (Britannica, 2011, Relativistic Mass). This is where CERN and the Large Hadron Collider come in.

Scientists at CERN (near Geneva) and Gran Sasso (in Italy) clocked a transmission of accelerated neutrinos transmitted from the former to the latter and found that they took about 60 nanoseconds less than the time light would have taken to travel the same distance. Keep in mind that these neutrinos do contain mass. In other words a form of matter has traveled faster than the speed of light.

Does this mean E =! mc^2 actually returns true? (For you non programming geeks what I'm asking here is are kinetic energy, mass and the speed of light not related to each other?). It is possible, and we may have to rethink a lot of what we "know" about physics if CERN's findings are independently verified.  Another possibility is that there is still a speed limit, but it is faster than we originally thought. Either way "We broke physics. Can we have a new one?"

I hope this answers your questions. It probably raised more than were answered, and that is my hope.

Works cited:

relativity. (2011). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from [link]
relativistic mass. (2011). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from [link]

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