Summary
September 2, 2011:
An international team of scientists, working at the CERN particle research center near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy announced that they have recorded particles travelling at speeds faster than the speed of light. For the past three years, they have been measuring the amount of time taken for Neutrinos created by the particle accellerator at CERN to reach Gran Sasso. The neutrinos were found to arrive 60 nanoseconds quicker than a beam of light would take to travel the same distance.
Scientists are being cautious as to what this all means, but since the standard model of physics assumes that the Speed of Light is absolute, having something break the "light barrier" is pretty big.
UPDATE: Turns out that it was a measuring error. The neutrinos weren't superluminal after all. Dang.
Source
Game and Story Use
- A possible source of technobabble to justify the FTL stardrive or subspace ansible in your Space Opera
- Something strange is happening to space and time; the anomolous behavior of the neutrinos are just the first clue!
- It's Cthulhu!!! He's really sleeping somewhere under Geneva and the Hardon Supercollider is waking him up!