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Professor Einstein, you can relax. E still equals mc2. Probably …
Renowned physicist Frank Close urges caution before we abandon the theory of relativity and prepare for time travel
The barman said: "Sorry, we don't serve neutrinos." A neutrino enters a bar.
This is but one of many tweets inspired by the news that neutrinos – ghostly subatomic particles – may travel faster than light. If so, science fiction could become science fact, with wonderful paradoxes such as effects preceding their causes. One example would be the punchline preceding the story (in case, like me, it took a while for you to decode the joke).
As a scientist I have grown up to believe this law of nature: the only thing that travels faster than light is a rumour. The story that scientists at Cern, Europe's giant particle physics laboratory near Geneva, had apparently created neutrinos that travelled faster than light, hit the news on Friday morning while I was half asleep and seemed to be the latest example of this law.
But as I awoke, and the story refused to go away, I began to panic that I would have to rewrite my book Neutrino – which it seemed was rapidly being overtaken by events. My only consolation was that this revision would be but a small tremor in the unimaginable change to our understanding of life, the universe and, indeed, everything, if this claim turned out to be true. The physics textbooks in the libraries of the world would be wrong; the foundations of science would crumble. Particles travelling faster than light, capable of carrying information, would alter everything. So, what's going on and why does it matter?
Einstein's theory of relativity was one of the great revolutions of 20th-century thought, and arguably the greatest theoretical construct of the human mind. When Isaac Newton built his laws of motion in the 17th century, he imagined space and time as some invisible matrix through which we pass without changing them. The metronome ticks steadily on as we move through a permanent static three-dimensional space. Einstein's vision was that space and time are fluid, intertwined, affected by our motion: the faster you move, the slower you age. This has many wonderful implications, such as the puzzle of the twins – Tweedledum who stays at home while Tweedledee takes a high-speed gap year and returns home wiser but, surprisingly, younger than his sibling.