But Fermilab's earlier work came with a large margin of error that raised doubts about whether the subatomic particles they studied had really gone faster than the supposed cosmic speed barrier of 299,792 kilometers per second. In fact, Fermilab researchers had found similar faster-than-light results in 2007 when studying neutrinos. Scientists at a competing research facility - the Chicago-based Fermilab - already have started looking at CERN's results. So the next step is to put it up for scrutiny by the broader particle physics community, and that is actually what is happening right now." The collaboration that has analyzed this data has tried very, very hard to understand it in terms of their apparatus and it hasn't gone away. "Most of the time you do that and you find some rather mundane explanation and goes away. "An experiment will measure something that looks unusual and the first thing you do there is say, 'We don't really believe this.' Then you try to understand it in terms of your experimental apparatus, your analysis, your techniques, and so on and so forth. "This kind of thing happens quite often in science," Gillies says. Instead, after three years of observations and data collecting, the researchers in Switzerland are asking other physicists around the world to try to independently verify their measurements of strange subatomic particles called "neutrinos."ĬERN spokesman James Gillies told RFE/RL today that the "general consensus" among the world's physicists is that there must have been some fault in the design of the experiment, the equipment used, or the method of analyzing the data.
In fact, the researchers themselves say they are not ready to proclaim a discovery. The findings from CERN has been met with skepticism among other physicists around the world. The European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva