Seems the good folks at CERN, when not too busy blowing up the Earth of countless parallel dimensions*, have found the time to prove Einstein wrong about a little thing called Relativity.
Particles found to break speed of light
Finding could overturn laws of physics
An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
The article simplifies the details a bit, since relativity does make allowances for hypothetical tachyonic particles that can move faster than light, provided they always move faster than light and are impossible to slow down, and might possibly have to be massless (or even have negative mass). Basically, the standard model of physics breaks everything down into three categories: objects with mass which can only travel slower than light, objects without mass which can only travel at the speed of light, and objects that probably don't exist (but which if they did exist would constantly move faster than light and appear to be in multiple places at once). It's all about the mass, really, as the fundamental equations behind relativity just require infinite energy to accellerate anything with mass up to the speed of light. So unless your big booty is made up of exotic matter that repels gravity and zips around the cosmos in two directions at once, you ain't never going anywhere near lightspeed.
But now it turns out the neutrino, a known particle which definitely has mass (though very very little per neutrino) breaks those basic rules, bringing everything else into doubt.
Unless of course it turns out the real problem is something to do with an incredibly tiny error in our maps or the grid of global positioning satellites that tell us how far away CERN is from San Grasso. The article doesn't indicate whether or not they actually shined a beam of light to compare it against. It'd be a real shame if the biggest news in science in our lifetime turned out to be nothing more than instrument malfunction or the coastline paradox. We are, after all, talking about 60 nanoseconds shaved off a 500-mile trip.
But if they're not somehow wrong, then this is the big one. If neutrinos can move faster than light, it's a whole new ballgame.
*: Why I'm no longer afraid the LHC is going to destroy us all when it gets to full power (1.21 Gigawatts, 55MPH) . I mean, aside from the fact that it hasn't yet, which is also pretty good evidence.
I came to terms with the LHC thanks to Schroedinger's Cat. I'm sure we all know the experiment, where the cat is put in the box, along with a lethal mechanism that can only be triggered by radioactive decay, and the result is that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead at the same time, and the waveform doesn't resolve into one state or the other until you open the box and observe it. Provided the cat is wearing a blindfold, because otherwise it might, you know, observe whether or not it died. Which, when you think about it, you can probably observe that you're alive even in a blindfold. In fact, odds are good the cat can only observe that it's alive. If it's not alive, then it's not observing that fact, which means there's no one to observe the quantum waveform so it's not dead in the first place. (Though I am thinking vampire kittens in an undead quantum superposition that die if they look at themselves would actually be a great plot device for a really stupid B-movie somebody ought to make.)
After going around in circles for a while, the mind puzzles of the cat in a box settled down into the notion of Quantum Immortality. The idea that you will live forever, but only in your own universe, which is but one out of an infinite number of parallel universes (the Many Worlds Interpretation). Everyone else resides in universes where you do eventually die (but they don't). We are all The Highlander, we just don't figure it out till we hit 150 or so and start setting what are longevity records in our own little universe. So take care of that body, because you're gonna be in it for a very long time. (Not to mention, you'll need it to be in good shape when The Kurgen shows up to challenge your geriatric self to a duel.)
Which brings me back to the LHC. Pretty much all the doomsday scenarios involving the LHC were in fact doomsday scenarios, not just inconvenience scenarios. Everybody buys it, as the earth turns into a quivering lump of steaming strange matter, breaks apart into a cloud of debris, or collapses into a black hole under the mass of the infinite matter from the future falling through the LHC's gaping time portal. In each of these scenarios, we all die. Which means there'd be nobody left to observe that we died, so therefore we're back to the position where we're not dead, or simultaneously dead and alive at the same time (a state you can avoid by simply unplugging your TV set). That in turn means that the LHC can't go wrong, because the negative consequences would kill us all, and my consciousness by definition only exists in a universe where I am alive. That the LHC was largely an all-or-nothing apocalypse ensured it could only end happily.
I should be a lot more afraid of experiments (unlike the LHC) that only have the potential to ravage half the earth, or could release a plague that could kill everyone but me.... heck, maybe it's not that we're all The Highlander, maybe we're all I Am Legend. That would really suck. So, barring the slim possibility of the Earth being overrun by blindfolded vampire kittens and I am the only human left to open the canned food for them (a scenario I dread, but refuse to take seriously), I long ago overcame my fears of the LHC.
