The new dean of Exact Sciences at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Yaron Oz, said he
does not believe that Albert Einstein will be disproved by scientists in Geneva
in his belief that the speed of light is the fastest and the only absolute thing
in nature.
But, speaking to
The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night, Oz said
that if the findings by physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) about the “greater speed” by the neutrino are correct, “it will
be sensational and change the way we see the laws of physics.”
RELATED:Hebrew University's Einstein archives to go onlineOz, a
particle physicist, said “it was too early to decide the truth of the speed of
light vs the speed of neutrinos on the basis of their sending neutrinos 730
kilometers to a lab in Italy and determining how fast the tiny atomic particles
arrived.
“According to their results, published late last week, the
neutrinos arrived faster than the speed of light. But we know neutrinos. Many of
these particles come to earth, and none of them had arrived at that
speed. So more experiments at other facilities must be conducted,” he
said.
“I would happy if it were correct, as it would be new and
incredible and change our way of thinking, but there is too much evidence that
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: Mechanics was correct. It is very unlikely that
he was wrong, but it is worth checking,” Oz said.
“According to the
Theory of Relativity, the neutrino is not of very great importance. But Einstein
based his theory on experiments that were conducted in his day. Scientists sent
two rays of light, one against the direction of the rotation of the earth and
one the other way, and they arrived at the same time. So he reached his
conclusions that light was faster.”
The CERN scientists have already published a paper on their
findings on the Internet, he said.
“They publicized it because they
couldn’t find an error in their analysis. But they do not present it as a
surety,” said the TAU professor, who added that he knew about the finding a few
days before it was published. “It could easily be that the trajectory of the
neutrino was very small, one in 100,000, and that would be enough to create a
different result from what we would have predicted,” he said.
If the
scientists at CERN – the world’s largest physics lab – are proven right,
continued Oz, who previously was head of TAU’s School of Physics, “nature will
not change, but the way we think about nature will change very significantly if
it is true. When we do calculations of nuclear accelerators, all of that
is based on the relativity of mechanics.”
Einstein, he stressed, did make
errors, “but there was no physicist in history who had such abilities to know
things and to know what is important.”