“Since Einstein introduced special relativity, the theory and the special status it gives to the speed of light have appeared iron-clad.
Until now, that is. Scientists working on the OPERA experiment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland beamed neutrinos 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground to Italy, and calculated how fast they made the trip. Shockingly, the neutrinos appeared to beat light speed by 60 billionths of a second. The finding appears to fly in the face of the last 106 years of physics.
“Our understanding hasn’t evolved at all, we’ve been doing extremely precise tests of special relativity since the very first days,” said Ben Monreal, an assistant professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara. “Special relativity has been passing tests with flying colors for over 100 years now. That is why this result is so surprising and unexpected.”
If the finding of the OPERA experiment does pan out, the implications are much more mind-bending. Under special relativity, if something travels faster than the speed of light, it goes backwards in time. Such a proposition could interfere with the basic rule that cause precedes effect, called causality.
“The reason a lot of physicists are very unmoved by these claims is that it could make causality itself very problematic,” Galison said. In other words, it raises the prospect of time travel.
There is another issue too. Einstein introduced the speed of light as a mathematical constant, c. If neutrinos can indeed exceed the speed of light, then c loses its special status, giving rise to a host of other problems elsewhere in physics, where c has been used in calculations, such as the famous formula E=mc^2. [Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Faster-Than-Light Discovery]
“For all of these reasons, people are going to need extra evidence to conclude that it is going to hold up,” Galison said.”
http://www.livescience.com/16248-speed-light-special-relativity-neutrinos.html
That looks interesting. I’ll have to check it out tomorrow. Time for bed.
The science isn’t settled?
From Wikipedia: In September 2011, OPERA researchers observed muon neutrinos apparently traveling faster than the speed of light.[6] In February and March 2012, OPERA researchers blamed this result on a loose fibre optic cable connecting a GPS receiver to an electronic card in a computer. On 16 March 2012, a report announced that an independent experiment in the same laboratory, also using the CNGS neutrino beam, but this time the ICARUS detector, found no discernible difference between the speed of a neutrino and the speed of light.