In September, last year, floodgates of sensationalism suddenly burst open in the realm of physics when a team of scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland, hailed what they called a ‘significant finding’ - measurements of the speed of a beam of subatomic particles known as neutrinos.
The team claimed that the beam in question reached the destination faster than light. No sooner had the news spread across the world than the world of science started spinning chaotically around a secondary loose axis, made of excitement and bewilderment in equal measures.
The scientists, who got intoxicatingly excited at the news, went as far as predicting the feasibility of time-travelling: go back in time to see how things were, say, when dinosaurs were at each other’s throat or Cleopatra was seducing her would-be lovers with her charm.
For those of us who took the news with a pinch of salt, it was yet another headline-grabbing by the scientists, when they couldn’t come up with something useful from a project that cost European taxpayers almost $10 billion.
They were supposed to spot Higgs Boson, a specific particle in the jungle of particle physics, in the final stages of the project. Yet, what we got was a ludicrously large red-herring. The mission failure was eclipsed by the ‘discovery’ that, all of a sudden, the ceiling of the speed of light had been broken.
As it turned out this week, the unexpected results were down to a combination of faulty wiring, a dodgy atomic clock and questionable position of a GPS device. These macro errors took place when the physicists were dealing with a micro world of particle physics, some of the measurements of which are even smaller than a millionth of a millimetre.
The British university professor who promised to eat his boxer short live on TV, if the speed of light was broken, could not hide his excitement at the emerging news this week. “Both my boxer shorts and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity are safe right now,” chuckled the learned academic with glee.
With the disputed results produced by an experiment carried out in dodgy background, Einstein once again emerged as the undisputed emperor of physics. The short-lived findings by the team of CERN scientist could not rattle his Theory of Relativity. Nor could they prove that subatomic particle were capable of moving faster than light, despite the most-up-to-date technology at their disposal.
The embarrassment suffered by the teams at CERN cannot be underestimated. On one hand, they were nowhere near any reliable evidence to prove that Higgs Boson exists – the main purpose of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). On the other hand, they could sense that the public interest in these projects is fast disappearing, perhaps quite irreversibly.
In this context, CERN may be forced to go on an unprecedented PR exercise in the hope that the European taxpayers will be willing to cough up more funds for their pet projects. This is a risky strategy as far as the scientific institute is concerned. They know very well what happened to the climate scientists, who were hell bent on scare-mongering the world with global warming.
However, there is a ray of hope for CERN despite gloom and doom. Although, their scientists may fail in their main mission – in conquering world of subatomic particles - they still can pull off a surprise on a completely different front for the betterment of mankind.
Sir Tim Berners Lee, the British scientist, went to work at CERN as a nuclear physicist and came up with HTML – Hyper Text Mark-up Language – which led to the birth of the World Wide Web. Sir Tim, who is credited with the invention of the internet as we know it, is a unique gentleman who never profited from his fame or patents while keeping a very low profile.
Sir Tim proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the place had been blessed by the angel of serendipity.
If the battered team at CERN can draw some inspiration from Sir Tim and produce something useful, the world may take them seriously again when they make very public statements in future – even if the subatomic particles run rings around them.
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