Dario Autiero in my opinion is the most talked about scientist of this year, not only by Physicist or scientist but by all those amateurs as well. Autiero has been at the centre of this media storm, since 23 September, when he and his colleagues at the international Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment announced results that seemed to remove a cornerstone of modern physics. At a seminar at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, and in a paper posted on the arXiv.org website (http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897), the OPERA team described how neutrinos — fundamental particles with no electrical charge and very low mass — seemed to make the 730-kilometre journey from CERN to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy some 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light would allow. If true, the result will challenge Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity and force theoretical physicists to rewrite their textbooks.
However, some scientists call this as “embarassement” and say that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Some of his colleagues refused to sign the manuscript. The OPERA team has repeated the experiment and has used better statistical approach to get the same results. But the true test, Autiero says, will come from two neutrino experiments that are attempting to replicate the results: the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, in which neutrinos fired from Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois, travel 720 kilometres to a detector in a mine in Minnesota; and T2K, which sends a beam from Tokai on the east coast of Japan to a detector in Kamioka, 300 kilometres to the north. Even if they prove the OPERA result wrong, Autiero says that he would not consider the experiment a failure. “Whatever happens, our most important contribution is not the result — it's the way we did the measuring,” he insists. “We have refined a method others can now use, and this is what science is about.”
What will happen to this theory in the coming years is still a big question. But the funniest thing is many amateurs are already debunking Einsteins theory and keep saying “I know this will happen”. What really will happen??? Lets wait and see ☺
Unlike · · Unfollow Post · December 22, 2011 near Singapore, Singapore
