What if particles really can exceed the speed of light?
It is a fascinating and provocative question.
But first, it should be said that Thursday’s news that physicists have seen subatomic particles called neutrinos exceed the Universe’s speed limit is a picture of science still at work.
The researchers at Cern in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy have tried really hard to find what they might be doing wrong – over three years and thousands of experiments – because they can hardly believe what they are seeing.
The publication of their results is a call for help to pick holes in their methods, and save physics as we now know it.
