Einstein Vindicated...

Excerpted from an article in today's WSJ by Michio Kaku:

But the floodgates finally burst open last week when a second group of physicists announced that they redid the entire experiment and found that Einstein was correct all along: Their neutrinos traveled at precisely the speed of light, not faster or slower.

What makes this second announcement so convincing is that they used much of the same apparatus as the previous group. They used the same particle accelerator at CERN, fired a beam of neutrinos over the same path, and used the same destination, a laboratory in Gran Sasso near Rome. The crucial difference between these two groups was the equipment used to measure the speed of the neutrinos. This gives enormous weight to the idea that the first group did not properly calibrate their instruments.

Last week the director for research at CERN, Sergio Bertolucci, issued a diplomatically worded statement that read, "The evidence is beginning to point towards the [earlier] result being an artifact of the measurement." Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia, a spokesman for the second group, was more blunt when he said, "We cannot be both right. One of us is wrong. I know who is right. We are right."

Since there is so much at stake, in the coming months more experiments will be done to verify this new result. But in the minds of most physicists the issue is now settled—Einstein's theory remains undefeated.

Do read the whole piece, as Dr. Kaku places this in context rather nicely...