The Neutrino Particle - The Big Debate

What We Already Know About the Neutrino Particle: 

The Neutrino particle was discovered in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli, it is a particle which is electrically neutral, has almost no mass, and is weakly interacting which means that it does not interfere with the ordinary matter it passes through, and ordinary matter has no affect on it.

Neutrino particles are created from types of radioactive decay or nuclear reactions that mainly happen in the Sun. There are 3 types of Neutrinos: Electron, Muon and Tau, and for each of these, there is an antineutrino. Most of the neutrinos that pass through the earth, come from the Sun, and just to get an idea of how omnipresent they are; approximately 400,000 billion neutrino particles pass through the earth every second.

The Big Debate:

According to the famous theory of relativity written by Albert Einstein, if the neutrino particle has no mass, then it must travel at the speed of light. However, if it does have mass, then it must travel below the speed of light. And up until 2011, that's exactly what has always been believed. 

In late September experiments carried out by CERN at the large hadron collider in Geneva were originally designed to find the mass of a neutrino particle, however, when the results came back, an incredible discovery was made; the neutrino particles were detected travelling 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of  light. 

CERN published these finding immediately to invite scrutiny from other scientists, all in an attempt to find out whether these findings could possibly be right. Unfortunately, within 2 weeks, over 30 scientists had published papers reporting on the faults of the experiment and how the findings could not be trusted. These results are yet to be assessed by a peer group, which would massively improve the reliability of them but physicians are keen to repeat these experiments to determine whether it could be possible. 

Scientists are obviously very sceptical to believe these results because if they are correct, then the whole base of particle physics, cosmology, astrophysics, and Einstein's famous law of relativity could be proven to be wrong - something which would change physics forever. Also, if this turns out to be the case, incredible ideas only previously feasible in films such as worm holes and time travel could be possible. 

However, the only way such bold claims will ever be believed is when more controlled experiments are carried out on neutrino particles to find the same result, which may not be too far away, the detectors on the large hadron collider are currently being upgraded, and once they are, new tests will be done to determine the velocities of these peculiar particles.

So watch this space and listen close ladies and gents... because if the scientists at CERN discover neutrino particles to travel faster than the speed of light; well, it might just be the one of biggest and most controversial discoveries made by man.