I imagine that you, like me, have all been distracted by the news of the last couple of days. No, not that stock prices are going through the floor, nor that Inter sacked its new manager after only five games into the new season. These are just everyday trivia compared to the new announcement that a neutrino can travel faster through Alpine bedrock than light can travel through a vacuum.  From the CERN laboratory in the suburbs of Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab near L’Aquila in Central Italy is 730 km as the neutrino flies and, according to a pre-publication (http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf ) authored by over 200 physicists and allied trades from a host of labs around the world, the neutrino can beat the photon by some 60 nanoseconds over that distance. Of course, the neutrino is even better because the photon would not get through the lab wall, let alone through bedrock!  At near the speed of light the photon travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond, meaning that the neutrino gets to Gran Sasso some 60 feet ahead of the photon-not even a close race.

This is a big deal because it possibly means that Einstein got it wrong (or not exactly right) when he told us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum flask.  Of course when light is traveling through air or water, or prosecco, it travels slower than it does in vacuo, giving rise to the refractive index of such materials. Maybe in this sense, bedrock is a Super-vacuum (you read it here first), inasmuch as particles having no charge and “negligible” mass can move through it a little bit faster than a light photon passes through empty space, thus rescuing Einstein. Or maybe they were 60 feet or so out in their measurement of the distance (did they use Google maps?). Or maybe the “ether” exists after all?

I suppose that now we can expect theorists and other weirdos to be rethinking relativity and their experimental colleagues to be remeasuring the speed of light.

Is this the new dawn (yet another) of physics?