“There was a young lady called Bright,
Who could travel much faster than light,
She set off one day,
In a relative way,
And arrived on the previous night.”

And so it seems the results suggesting faster than light neutrinos were actually due to a faulty connection.

I wonder how much coverage this news will get compared to the original “findings”?

Italian scientists have reported a finding that implies that neutrinos can travel faster than light. So much for Einstein, then. (And perhaps Lieutenant Montgomery Scott of Star Trek fame – to be born in Linlithgow in 2222.)

I can’t deny it’s quite exciting and may mean we have to throw over everything we thought we knew about the the way the universe works.

And perhaps all those space operas where starships cleave the paper light years with ease might be reasonable after all.

Well, maybe.

The result is only that the neutrinos seem to arrive 60 billionths of a second earlier than they should have, with a plus or minus margin of 10 billionths of a second. It awaits checking.

Caution may be in order. Remember cold fusion?

In any case light is already known to travel at slightly different speeds depending on the medium it is moving through. It is slower in glass and air than in a vacuum, so maybe this is a similar effect.

Anyway, the reported difference between neutrinos and light isn’t much – 299,798,454 metres per second compared to the 299,792,458 metres per second of light in a vacuum and according to the first link above it’s already been postulated that neutrinos might be faster than light, if only by a fraction.

I think there’s sufficient accumulated evidence to suggest that Einstein’s famous E = mc² equation is reliable that we won’t have to junk it just yet. Newton’s F = ma and F = Gm₁m₂/r² are still going strong after 400 years.