News travels faster than neutrinos…

In fact, barely a day after a remarkable scientific development made front-page headlines all over the world, one of the protagonists in that apparent breakthrough – Dr Nicholas Sammut, CEO of the Malta Council of Science and Technology, and one of the team of scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Switzerland – was singled out by the Labour press as a possible PN candidate for election 2013.

And while news agencies worldwide struggled to convey the sheer amazement and interest provoked by the preliminary results of CERN’s experiments – results which would, if proved correct, prove Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity wrong, and force scientists to revise their entire understanding of the universe, and the laws which govern it – the Labour Party was evidently more interested in interpreting the entire development as nothing more than a subtle propaganda spin employed by Nationalist government to elevating the profile of latest ‘conquest’.

PL paper Kullhadd even suggested that The Times’s report about the results of CERN’s experiment was nothing more a thinly disguised propaganda stunt to ‘introduce’ Sammut as a prospective PN candidate.

But is the scientific director of MCST really planning to contest the next election with the PN? His response: “This is all news to me.”

Sammut has been collaborating with CERN for eight years, designing critical control systems of the accelerator infrastructure for the machinery used in the experiment.

According to Sammut, the aim of the experiment is to study the properties of special fundamental particles called neutrinos.

“Understanding their properties is very important as they are fundamental particles, i.e., fundamental building blocks of the universe and hence everything around us,” he adds.

“The experiment generates neutrinos using the infrastructure at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) and directs them underground for 732km towards an underground Italian laboratory of the INFN in Gran Sasso, Italy”.

Some of the latest results suggest that individual these neutrinos, which unlike light photons possess a tiny amount of mass, may nonetheless travel faster than the speed of light – a feat hitherto believed to be impossible.

But like the Maltese scientist’s alleged involvement with the PN, these results have yet to be confirmed. 

Sammut himself is cautious when talking about the possible implications. “According to Einstein, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. However, recent data from this experiment is indicating that these neutrinos are travelling 20 parts per million faster than the speed of light,” he explains.

“This result comes as a complete surprise which could have tremendous consequences on fundamental science. It could mean opening an era of science and technology leading to time travel…”

However, he concedes that independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established.

“When an experiment yields a surprising observation such as this, and is unable to account for it, the ethics of science demand that the results be made available to a wider community, to seek scrutiny and to encourage independent experiments,” Sammut said.

“We have therefore decided to open the result to broader scrutiny and we are publishing all data to be sure that there are no other, more mundane, explanations. The experiment is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms. The strong constraints arising from these observations make an interpretation of the measurement in terms of modification of Einstein’s theory unlikely, and give further strong reason to seek new independent measurements…”