Here’s the story from Nautilus:
Ereditato is the former leader of the 160 physicists from 13 countries that compose the OPERA collaboration, whose goal is to study neutrino physics. It was first proposed in 2000, and Ereditato led it from 2008 to 2012. Then in late winter of 2011, the impossible seemed to happen. “The guy who is looking at the data calls me,” Ereditato tells me from my computer screen. “He says, ‘I see something strange.’ ” What he saw was evidence that neutrinos traveled through 454 miles of Earth’s crust, from Switzerland to Italy—which they are supposed to do—at such a high speed that they arrived 60.7 nanoseconds faster than light could travel that distance in outer space—which should have been impossible.
Sparing readers the suspense,
With the mistake found and fixed, OPERA’s measurement of the neutrino velocity is now the most accurate in the world. And it is perfectly consistent with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The faint hope for new physics that wasn’t predicted by the venerable Standard Model was dead. But the performance of the OPERA team in finding a single loose cable among the thousands of electrical channels of experimental equipment was remarkable.
Fascinating read anyway.
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