• Question: do you think that it is possible for neutrinos to travel faster than light?

    Asked by jneedham to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 13 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by benchunwilf.
    • Photo: Clare Burrage

      Clare Burrage answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I think it’s unlikely that they do, although we can’t be completely sure. As you probably heard the OPERA experiment detected neutrinos that seemed to be traveling faster than light, although recently they have suggested that there were some errors in their study which might have made us think that neutrinos are travelling faster than light when they are not.
      But what makes me think that the neutrinos are not travelling faster than light is this: We know that neutrinos can interact with electrons, and so if neutrinos go faster than we think they should then electrons should go faster than we expect as well. But we have very precise measurements of the speed of the electron – much more precise than the measurements of the speed of the neutrinos – and electrons travel at exactly the speed they should do.
      So probably neutrinos don’t go faster than light.

    • Photo: Ben Smart

      Ben Smart answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      There was the experiment recently that suggested that neutrinos do travel faster than the speed of light (the OPERA experiment). But those results don’t make sense since there are loads and loads of other experiments that tell us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. It now seems that the OPERA experiment made a mistake and that their results are actually wrong, which means that the neutrinos never went faster than the speed of light.

    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Not that we know of, but we don’t know the whole story. Most likely it’s just an error at the detectors.

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