[glatt]

You may have seen this in the news, but it's really amazing/interesting/confusing.

Researchers at CERN have successfully made nutrinos travel faster than the speed of light, which is impossible. Fermilab in Chicago had reached similar results a few years ago, but their antiquated american equipment is so crappy, the margin of error was greater than the amount by which nutrinos exceeded light speed, so they tossed out the results. The newer CERN facility is much better and its margin of error is smaller, so they are certain that their results are accurate. Except for the little matter of it being impossible.

I really wish we hadn't scrapped our half built super collider in Texas. it would be useful to have a state of the art facility to compare the CERN results to.

GENEVA — A startling find at one of the world’s foremost laboratories that a subatomic particle seemed to move faster than the speed of light has scientists around the world rethinking Albert Einstein and one of the foundations of physics.

Now they are planning to put the finding to further high-speed tests to see if a revolutionary shift in explaining the workings of the universe is needed — or if the European scientists made a mistake.

Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, who announced the discovery Thursday are still somewhat surprised themselves and planned to detail their findings on Friday.

The claim is being greeted with skepticism inside and outside the European lab.

“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN.

CERN provided the particle accelerator to send neutrinos on a breakneck 454-mile (730-kilometer) trip underground from Geneva to Italy. France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research collaborated with Italy’s Ran Sass National Laboratory for the experiment, which has no connection to the atomic-smashing Large Hadron Collider, which is also located at CERN.

Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that “they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail.”

That will be necessary, because Einstein’s special relativity theory underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. “It has worked perfectly up until now.” And part of that theory is that nothing is faster than the speed of light.

CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.

Given the enormous implications of the find, they spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.

A team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007. But that experiment had such a large margin of error that it undercut its scientific significance.