Bye bye relativity? Scientists apparently break speed of light.

[John Dibble]

What? The word of Einstein must never be questioned. Ever. These heretics must be excommunicated from Science.

But seriously, should these results be replicated this is f**king awesome. This is potential Nobel Prize material.

Speed of light in a medium /= speed of light in vacuum.

Ok... and do you think the highly trained physicists working at CERN don't know that? The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second. The speed of these neutrinos is supposedly 299,798,454 meters per second. (link to another article w/ that number)

[John Dibble]

I'll bet on Albert...CERN dudes probably arent taking something into account

The thought has occurred to my inner amateur physicist that somehow their experiment may be somehow be warping spacetime somewhat like a warp drive, allowing the neutrinos to fall into the warped spacetime and only appear to arrive at their destination faster than light. Though that's entirely speculation and I wouldn't have any clue whether or not it's plausible since I know only what the news articles have said about the experiment.

[John Dibble]

Found another article that suggests that an alternative is that the neutrinos were possibly traveling through higher dimensions of space, which if true apparently is a victory for string theory and would still be Nobel Prize material.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0922/Particle-traveling-faster-than-light-Two-ways-it-could-rewrite-physics

[John Dibble]

Dangit!  Some error in the experiment was always the most likely reason, but we could hope.

hope for what, How the World Works by Scientists Who Demand to be Worshipped, Version: 49917912372?

Hope for learning something new and interesting about the universe that defies our prior knowledge.

And I don't think anyone is demanding to be worshiped here - the scientists followed proper procedure. They tried to figure out what might have given them results that were outside of expectations, published their results when they were reasonably sure they weren't due to problems while expressing caution to not leap on it as fact, and asked other scientists to try to replicate their results. That they may have not caught onto all possible problems with their experiment is totally understandable - they are human, and the machinery they are working with is likely more complicated than the machines we use to send people into space. (which have had disastrous problems on more than one occasion) It's entirely because they know the possibility they were wrong in some way that they asked others to check their work.