A very current article for interest:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
"Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light."

If you are a physicist then you would probably agree that it is very unlikely that neutrinos could ever really be faster than light, everything we know will all of the sudden be turned upside-down. It would be an extremely serious revelation. But at the same time as scientists we have to be open to the possbility, not fear it. We don't have to be worried about telling people that Earth isn't the centre of the universe anymore, and we have to be careful not to hinder change just because it is against everything we know and believe in.

I am not a particle physicist, but i am a physicist, so i don't know much about this particular field. Perhaps this puzzling result (which i think will soon be found to be a systematic error as noted in the article) is being publishing in such a manner as to attract public interest and maybe funding (cynical)? At the same time they have made a really exciting forum of debate. Exciting time to be a physicist!

Like i said i personally think it may be an error, but if not, if it does "appear" to be faster than light, then it must mean that neutrinos somehow morph (warp) space-time in a different way, or maybe flicker between what i will call "sub-space layers" (watch too much star trek lol) to account for the difference (and not that they are actually faster than light). Neutrinos are particularly strange in any case, i think we need to know more about them before we can make such great conclusions from this experiment.

Ender

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This effect can only be caused by 1 of 5 things:

1. Measurement error.

2. The neutrinos are exceeding light speed.

3. Relativistic effects: eg CERN and Rome are travelling at different rotational speed; CERN and Rome are at different altitudes; tidal effects altering distance and/or gravity. These factors have not been properly factored in.

4. Gravity waves: perhaps CERN has inadvertently constructed a gravity wave detector.

5. Something else.

http://xkcd.com/955/

I bet you £200 it doesn't pan out...

When I read the paper this morning, I felt exactly like I would feel if God rang me on my mobile to say that evolution is rubbish.

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The results were statistically significant, and I trust that the boys at CERN have done a lot of work in documenting the possible causes and ruling them out (or factoring them in appropriately to the error model).

There could be multiple explanations. I personally like the idea that the neutrinos are not breaking the universal speed limit, but were in fact just taking a short cut (through another dimension, as would be allowable in the many competing string theories, and others).

Time will tell whether the results are accurate and what the cause of the results is, but if the results are confirmed, it won't immediately suggest that Einstein is totally wrong. Clearly Einstein's work is completely correct, as we've been using it for almost a century with great success. If the results are confirmed, it will probably only mean that although Einstein's work is correct, it is not as universal as we used to think, and Einstein's work will prove to be a limited version of a more elaborate theory.

This is what we seen with Newtonian physics. It's not that Relativity proved Newtonian physics to be wrong... Newtonian physics is still correct, and engineers and scientists like myself still use it to great effect to design the vast majority of things that fuel our societies - aircraft, spacecraft, cars, buildings, bridges, infrastructure, etc. It was simply the case that Newtonian physics applied in a more limited sense to the Universe as a whole than we used to think. Newtonian physics is a special case of Einsteinian physics, and if the neutrino results are confirmed, in all likeliood it will be the case that Einsteinien physics is a special case of a new era of more elaborate physics.

So nobody has to worry that Evolution is next!!!

... although I must admit, I'm half hoping that some intern did the calculations and was using imperial units instead of metric or something, just for the sheer hilarity and the opportunity to create yet another anecdote to warn undergraduates about the perils of units!

I think measurement error is probably ruled out.

The speed of light is invariant in all reference frames.