The final nail in the coffin may have been dealt to the idea that neutrino particles can travel faster than light.
The same lab that first reported the shocking results last September, which could have upended much of modern physics, has now reported that the subatomic particles called neutrinos "respect the cosmic speed limit."
Physicist Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Switzerland's CERN physics lab, presented the results Friday at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan.
"Although this result isn't as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down," Bertolucci said in a statement.
The new findings come from four experiments that study streams of neutrinos sent from CERN in Geneva to the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. All four, including the experiment behind the first faster-than-light findings, called OPERA, found that this time around, the nearly massless neutrinos traveled quickly, but not that quickly. [ 10 Implications of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos ]
Last year, OPERA measured that neutrinos were making the 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip between the two labs more speedily than light, arriving there 60 nanoseconds earlier than a beam of light would.
At the time, the physicists were stunned because such a result seemed to break Einstein's prediction that nothing could travel faster than light. This idea is at the heart of his theory of special relativity, on which much of our modern technology and scientific understanding is based.
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