Recent news of subatomic particles called neutrinos breaking the speed of light has brought many questions to the physics community. James Kneller , assistant professor of physics, specializes in neutrino astrophysics but raised doubts about their ability to surpass the speed of light.

“A neutrino is a fundamental particle just like an electron or photon or quark.  They are extremely hard to detect,” Kneller said. “Their interactions are so weak that it doesn’t really combine or participate with other kinds of particles.  A neutrino will pass through a light year of lead before it stops.”

These neutrinos change state too.  Physics professor Gail McLaughlin said these subatomic particles are ubiquitous.

“They have very small mass and no charge,” McLaughlin said. “There are three types and they can oscillate and change flavor as they travel. Lots of them pass through your body and are created by the sun.”

The particles breaking the speed of light challenges the current theories physics is built upon.

“Of all the things they could have said, breaking the speed of light is high up there on the shock value,” Kneller said. “It would shake it to its foundations. It would have very profound implications.”

The experiment wasn’t intended to find results of this nature, but to monitor neutrino behavior in their oscillations.

“[Breaking] the speed of light [observation] is really secondary,” Kneller said. “It was intended to view what’s called neutrino flavor oscillations.  The Universe has more matter than anti-matter.  It’s thought that perhaps through this neutrino flavor change there is a possibility you could explain the matter and anti-matter symmetry of the universe.”

Physics assistant professor Albert Young said these observations go against nearly all other observations regarding Einstein’s Special Relativity.

“Neutrinos from a supernova in 1987 show that light and neutrinos arrived at exactly the same time from an incredibly distant place, which is inconsistent with recent data,” Young said.

The findings may reveal properties of the Universe that had been unknown, but McLaughlin voiced her skepticism.

“They tried to see if they did anything wrong with their experiment and they couldn’t [find anything] so they published the result so it could be checked,” McLaughlin said. “Everyone is very skeptical until another experiment comes along and shows the same thing.”

Young expressed similar sentiments.

“I was involved with three projects that all had promises of new physics at the 6 sigma level,” Young said. “The results turned out to be false, because the experiment is difficult.  Scientists do their best but it doesn’t take much of a mistake to create false results.”

The reaction by physicists has been to duplicate the results independently to try to verify the original data.

“Colleagues of ours at Duke will be directly involved with checking the results,” Young said. “It may be worth focusing on but it really doesn’t make a case for the use of my time.”

Kneller , a neutrino astrophysicist, expressed his doubt as well.

“People are very skeptical—it’s just one experiment and what people would really want is more than one experiment to verify the same thing,” Kneller said.

McLaughlin said the reason we believe things can’t travel faster than the speed of light is because there are solid examples where that theory works extremely well. 

“Most people would like to see a confirmation of this experiment by a separate group,” McLaughlin said.