For a few months in early 2012, the scientific world held its breath as researchers raced to establish whether one of the greatest tenets of modern physics was under threat. The panic was triggered by reports from the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, beneath Italy’s Apennine Mountains, which appeared to show bursts of neutrinos (tiny, near-massless subatomic particles) fired from a particle accelerator at CERN on the Swiss/French border, travelling faster than the speed of light.
According to more than a century of established physics, the speed of light in a vacuum – 299,792.458 kilometres (186,282.397 miles) per second – is the ultimate speed limit of the universe. No object with mass can reach this speed for very good reasons outlined in the work of Albert Einstein; as they get close, travelling at so-called ‘relativistic’ speeds, the strange effects predicted by Einstein’s theory of special relativity take effect, including time slowing down, distances contracting, and mass increasing (making it ever-more difficult to accelerate). Only massless photons of light and other electromagnetic radiation can reach the speed of light itself.
Sadly for those anticipating a revolution in physics sources, rigorous checking at the Gran Sasso laboratory eventually identified errors in the timing of the neutrino bursts, confirming they had, in fact, not exceeded the speed of light: for the moment at least, the status quo prevails.
But ‘superfast’ doesn’t always have to threaten the fundamental laws of physics – objects moving far faster than we would expect, even if not at relativistic speeds, can still present us with intriguing puzzles to solve.
Looked at from this perspective, our universe is full of superfast phenomena – from weird particles that get within a trillionth of a percent of light speed itself, to planets, stars and even man-made space probes moving far, far faster than a speeding bullet.
