And with it, apparently, the Standard Model of physics:
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said 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.
And, of course, this is a totally awesome discovery, because everyone knows what this means. HYPERSPACE! But is it even properly considered science, when it is “a totally unexpected finding”? Obviously, science will now be brought to bear on it, at least the replication aspect.
But what is the hypothesis for this faster-than-light neutrino movement that was being tested?