Breaking the Speed Barrier

Call it a whim or whatever you will, but there are some scientific nitty-gritty kind of coclusions that totally piss me off. For instance, the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a whatever they call it now. But this neutrino business is most interesting. Einstein's grave may be disturbed from within as his bones do a mad jig at the news that one of his fundamental principles behind establishing modern physics may be not how he theorised it to be.

This neutrino (doesn't matter if you don't know what exactly it is, enough to know that it is one of the many sub-atomic particles) apparently travels faster than light. If that be the case, then E=mc² loses meaning, since c is no more the ultimate speed. Admittedly, the difference in the speed of light and this neutrino particle is quite a small one, to the order of about 50 nanoseconds, too small for any of us humans to ever register, but the fact remains that it exists.

Of course, this is only the second experiment, and the first proper one, that has shown such results. And the scientific community is not taking this lying down. So I suppose there will still be a wait before this is actually proven, inasmuch as anything sub-atomic and particle physics related can be proven, keeping in mind always Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

But the jury is already out about what difference, if any, it makes to our everyday lives. Is there any reason to be alarmed or to celebrate? Who knows, but most likely, no. And I suppose much the same can be said about Pluto.