VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Physicists stunned the world last year by announcing they’d seen signs that particles called neutrinos were traveling faster than light — a feat thought to be proven impossible by Einstein. Ever since, other researchers have been racing to try the experiment on their own to see if the findings hold up.

Some results of these tests should be announced this spring, scientists said Friday (Feb. 17) here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“It’s very hard to find an error by reading a paper,” said particle physicist Rob Roser of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., who was not involved in the original experiment. “What you need is for someone else to make the measurement. We’ll see what happens.”

Shocking finding

The bizarre finding was first reported in September 2011, when physicists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, announced that an experiment called OPERA had measured the tiny subatomic particles apparently breaking what was thought to be the ultimate cosmic speed limit.

OPERA sends neutrinos 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, and measures how fast they take to make the trip. While researchers expected the almost-massless particles to travel at near light speed, they actually appeared to arrive at their destination about 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would have.

If this really occurred, it would contradict Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and throw much of physics into upheaval. [10 Implications of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos]

Double check

The discovery was met with shock and skepticism by most physicists, including the members of the OPERA team themselves.

Joked Sergio Bertolucci, research director at CERN, the finding is hard to believe because “nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time.”

The researchers immediately invited other experts to weigh in and try to reproduce their results to either confirm or disprove the finding. And that’s just what they’ve been doing.

Several attempts to recreate the OPERA experiment have been undertaken around the world, including one in Japan called T2K (Tokai to Kamioka), and another, called MINOS, at Fermilab.

MINOS sends neutrinos from its location near Chicago to a mine in northern Minnesota. Last fall, MINOS didn’t have the right equipment to make a measurement sensitive enough to prove or disprove the OPERA results. Since then, the lab has installed new hardware and started up the experiment.

“They started two weeks ago collecting data,” Roser said. “I would expect you would hear in May or June what Fermilab’s answer is.”

Other sources of error

In addition to looking to outside measurements, the OPERA researchers have tweaked their experimental setup to address concerns raised by other scientists about potential sources of error.

For example, some worried that the use of GPS satellites to time the departure of the neutrinos from CERN in the original experiment was introducing flaws. In response, the OPERA physicists conducted the experiment again, using only atomic clocks to measure timing, and still came up with the same result.

“They’ve changed a number of things, which might have brought them into some doubt,” Bertolucci said. “It is very difficult and the fact that nobody was able to find an easy solution immediately means essentially they’ve done their job.”

If other experiments like MINOS and T2K also measure neutrinos traveling faster than light, it doesn’t rule out that an error no one thought of is plaguing all the experiments. However, it makes the likelihood of an error much more remote, Roser said.

“I don’t know which I’m rooting for,” Roser told LiveScence. “If three or four different experiments around the world see the same thing it’s hard not to be convinced.”

For evidence that sometimes shocking results are true, Bertolucci pointed to the famous 1887 experiment by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley that disproved the notion, popular at the time, that the universe was filled with a medium that carries light called an ether.

“They found a result totally incompatible with the present theory of the time, but they were right,” Bertolucci said. “We have to just keep an open mind.”

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. For more science news, follow LiveScience on twitter @livescience.

• Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature
• Surprising Faster-Than-Light Discovery: How It Works (Infographic)
• The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things

LOS ANGELES, Feb 8 (TheWrap.com) – Tom Fleischman has mixed sound for many of the Martin Scorsese movies that are full of gunshots, punches and profanities – but like his director, Fleischman tried a change of pace last year with “Hugo.” The Best Picture nominee’s sound palette leans toward the ticking of clocks, the bustle of a Parisian train station and the occasional roar of a locomotive, much of it set to the strains of small-combo jazz from the early decades of the 20th Century.

Fleischman is a five-time Oscar nominee; his earlier nods came for “Reds,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Gangs of New York” and “The Aviator.”

What were the specific challenges in “Hugo” for you?

I guess the nightmare train scene, where the train crashes into the station, was the biggest challenge. Mainly because there were lots of sound effects and lots of music, and whatever dialogue there was had to come through that. And when I first heard Howard Shore’s score, I thought, “How are we going to get all of this in there and have it make any sense?” You start piling a lot of stuff in, and eventually it just turns to mush and you don’t really hear anything.

But when we added the music, it really played, and you could hear it all. Howard really did a great job on that cue. It’s tough to have a driving cue like that, which is big and loud and orchestrated, and have it not blot out everything else.

Most of the action takes place inside the huge train station, where you’ve got sound coming from all directions: train noise, music from the cafe and the stores, people everywhere.

Balancing that stuff out is difficult, and it takes a lot of care. And the set was very noisy. Besides all the extras, with lots of movement and footsteps, there was steam all over the train station. And steam generators make noise, which we had to justify with the steam we see in the picture.

But the biggest challenge in the train station, I think, was to get the right quality in some of the music. When the station inspector meets the flower lady, there’s music playing that is supposed to be coming from somewhere in the station, perhaps the cafe. That was a challenge to get the right sound for that source cue, to make it seem believable and still have the emotional quality that Marty was looking for.

The film makes wonderful use of 3D to create the space in which the action takes place, and obviously sound is a large part of creating that immersive environment.

Oh, absolutely. I’ve always said that we’ve been mixing in 3D for years. We’ve always had surround speakers. But this was the first 3D film that I’ve worked on.

Did your process change because of the 3D?

We didn’t actually mix with 3D glasses or anything like that. I screened the film before we started in 3D, so I knew what to expect. And later on in the process, when we had something together, we went back and screened it again in 3D and made some adjustments. It was a lot of fun.

Did the Dolby 7.1 surround format helped with creating the 3D environment?

Yes, it did. Particularly in that nightmare train sequence. The close-up of the locomotive, the wheels, the pistons – we were able to pan those things very effectively to the side speakers without having it overwhelm anything from the back. That also helped in being able to work with music. It was the first time I used the 7.1, but I really liked it.

You’ve done quite a few things with Martin Scorsese over the years.

Yeah, I’ve worked on just about every one of his films since “The King of Comedy.” I did a little bit of temp work on “Raging Bull,” but they mixed that out here on the west coast. And then I started with “King of Comedy,” and I think I’ve worked on every one of his films since then.

Ben Kingsley said that between “action” and “cut,” Marty sees everything an actor does. When he’s working with you, does he hear everything?

Yes, he does. And he always knows what he wants. He never comes in experimenting and trying to find a theme or a motif in sound. He always knows what he wants going in, and that usually involves hearing the dialogue, hearing the music and hearing the sound effects.

(Laughs) That’s what he says to me when he walks in first thing. “Tom, I want to hear the dialogue, I want to hear the music and I want to hear the sound effects.” At any given moment, there’s always one of those three things that’s the most important, and so it’s a matter of making that work, and making it work in a way that the audience isn’t aware that you’re manipulating things.

I feel like I’m successful when the audience does not notice what I’m doing. I’m not a gear head – it’s not about putting in the coolest sounds, it’s about telling the story. And anything in the track that doesn’t serve to tell the story shouldn’t be there.

(Editing By Zorianna Kit)

LOS ANGELES, Feb 8 (TheWrap.com) – Tom Fleischman has mixed sound for many of the Martin Scorsese movies that are full of gunshots, punches and profanities – but like his director, Fleischman tried a change of pace last year with “Hugo.” The Best Picture nominee’s sound palette leans toward the ticking of clocks, the bustle of a Parisian train station and the occasional roar of a locomotive, much of it set to the strains of small-combo jazz from the early decades of the 20th Century.

Fleischman is a five-time Oscar nominee; his earlier nods came for “Reds,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Gangs of New York” and “The Aviator.”

What were the specific challenges in “Hugo” for you?

I guess the nightmare train scene, where the train crashes into the station, was the biggest challenge. Mainly because there were lots of sound effects and lots of music, and whatever dialogue there was had to come through that. And when I first heard Howard Shore’s score, I thought, “How are we going to get all of this in there and have it make any sense?” You start piling a lot of stuff in, and eventually it just turns to mush and you don’t really hear anything.

But when we added the music, it really played, and you could hear it all. Howard really did a great job on that cue. It’s tough to have a driving cue like that, which is big and loud and orchestrated, and have it not blot out everything else.

Most of the action takes place inside the huge train station, where you’ve got sound coming from all directions: train noise, music from the cafe and the stores, people everywhere.

Balancing that stuff out is difficult, and it takes a lot of care. And the set was very noisy. Besides all the extras, with lots of movement and footsteps, there was steam all over the train station. And steam generators make noise, which we had to justify with the steam we see in the picture.

But the biggest challenge in the train station, I think, was to get the right quality in some of the music. When the station inspector meets the flower lady, there’s music playing that is supposed to be coming from somewhere in the station, perhaps the cafe. That was a challenge to get the right sound for that source cue, to make it seem believable and still have the emotional quality that Marty was looking for.

The film makes wonderful use of 3D to create the space in which the action takes place, and obviously sound is a large part of creating that immersive environment.

Oh, absolutely. I’ve always said that we’ve been mixing in 3D for years. We’ve always had surround speakers. But this was the first 3D film that I’ve worked on.

Did your process change because of the 3D?

We didn’t actually mix with 3D glasses or anything like that. I screened the film before we started in 3D, so I knew what to expect. And later on in the process, when we had something together, we went back and screened it again in 3D and made some adjustments. It was a lot of fun.

Did the Dolby 7.1 surround format helped with creating the 3D environment?

Yes, it did. Particularly in that nightmare train sequence. The close-up of the locomotive, the wheels, the pistons – we were able to pan those things very effectively to the side speakers without having it overwhelm anything from the back. That also helped in being able to work with music. It was the first time I used the 7.1, but I really liked it.

You’ve done quite a few things with Martin Scorsese over the years.

Yeah, I’ve worked on just about every one of his films since “The King of Comedy.” I did a little bit of temp work on “Raging Bull,” but they mixed that out here on the west coast. And then I started with “King of Comedy,” and I think I’ve worked on every one of his films since then.

Ben Kingsley said that between “action” and “cut,” Marty sees everything an actor does. When he’s working with you, does he hear everything?

Yes, he does. And he always knows what he wants. He never comes in experimenting and trying to find a theme or a motif in sound. He always knows what he wants going in, and that usually involves hearing the dialogue, hearing the music and hearing the sound effects.

(Laughs) That’s what he says to me when he walks in first thing. “Tom, I want to hear the dialogue, I want to hear the music and I want to hear the sound effects.” At any given moment, there’s always one of those three things that’s the most important, and so it’s a matter of making that work, and making it work in a way that the audience isn’t aware that you’re manipulating things.

I feel like I’m successful when the audience does not notice what I’m doing. I’m not a gear head – it’s not about putting in the coolest sounds, it’s about telling the story. And anything in the track that doesn’t serve to tell the story shouldn’t be there.

(Editing By Zorianna Kit)