The day after news broke of a possible revolution in physics ——particles （粒子） moving faster than light ?a scientist leading the European experiment that made the discovery calmly explained it to a standing-room- only crowd at CERN． The physicist, Dario Auterio, did not try to explain what the results might mean for the laws of physics, let alone the broader world．After an hour of technical talk, he simply said, "Therefore, we present to you today this difference, this unusualness．" But what unusualness it may be．From 2009 through 2011, the massive OPERA detector （探测器）buried in a mountain in Gran Sasso, Italy, recorded subatomic particles called neutrinos （ 中微子） arriving faster than light can move in an empty space．The neutrinos generated at CERN are hardly detectably early．If confirmed, the finding would throw more than a century of physics into disorder． "If it's correct, it's phenomenal．" said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois．"We'd be looking at a whole new set of rules" for how the universe works．Those rules would bend, or possibly break, Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905．Basical at the time, the theory tied together space and time, matter and energy, and set a hard limit for the speed of light, later measured to be about 186, 000 miles per second． No experiment in 106 years had broken that speed limit．Physicists expect strict study to follow, which OPERA and CERN scientists welcomed． Fermilab operates a similar experiment, called MINOS, that shoots neutrinos from Illinois to an underground detector in Minnesota．In 2007, MINOS discovered a just detectable amount of faster than-light neutrinos, but the permissible difference of error was too big to "mention" , Plunkett said． Fermilab scientists will reanalyze their data, which will take six to eight months．In 2013, the MINOS detector, now offline, will restart after an upgrade．It could then offer confirmation of the results． 小题1:Why are the European scientists not sure about the results of the experiment?
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