So some truly exciting news came in from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. A neutrino is a very low mass subatomic particle that usually travels close to the speed of light, but in a very unusual, potentially ground-breaking development, neutrinos that were sent from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratory, showed up ahead of schedule, you might say: they arrived a few billionths of a second sooner than what was once thought to be the speed limit of the universe, 186,000 MP/s, the speed of light in a vacuum, would have permitted.
You may perhaps be feeling somewhat let down by this supposed "ground-breaking" piece of information. After all, it's only a few billionths of a second, it's virtually nothing, not even worth nothing. True, a few billionths of a second may not seem like much, but the scientific theories of Albert Einstein operate and are contingent on the speed of light NEVER being broken. These results have yet to be independently verified, and so this may indeed all turn out to be a dead end, but if it is true... if the speed of light truly can be broken, the picture of physics that was painted by Einsteins theory of general relativity may not be as good a description for the way our universe operates at the macroscopic level as was once thought, indeed as has been thought for the last 100 years that mankind has been doing physics.
It's exciting times in the world of physics.
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