Faster Than a Speeding Photon (IEEE Spectrum)

The photon should never lose a race. But on Thursday, stories started trickling in of a baffling result: neutrinos that move faster than light. News of this potential violation of special relativity is everywhere now. But despite a flurry of media coverage, it’s still hard to know what to make of the result.
As far as particle physics results go, the finding itself is fairly easy to convey. OPERA, a 1300-metric-ton detector that sits in Italy’s underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory, detected neutrinos that seem to move faster than the speed of light. The nearly massless particles made the 2.43-millisecond, 730-kilometer trip from CERN, where they were created, to OPERA about 60 nanoseconds faster than a photon would.

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