It's has been a lot of fun to follow the excitement about faster-than-light neutrinos on the science blogs, and I specially like the follow-up discussions in the comments sections. It's entertaining to see the theorists come up with all sort of harebrained schemes to explain the result, in case it turns out to be right. The two things that stood out the most for me:
- MINOS has already seen faster-than-light neutrinos back in 2007
- A theory that says that what we are seeing isn't the result of neutrinos traveling faster than light, but light traveling slower than light! That is, this whole time we have been measuring the speed of light, we have been wrong, it wasn't the speed of light in relativity, but just an approximation. The idea is that the photons interact with virtual particles in the vacuum, slowing them down - this is called the Scharnhorst effect. So there is a c that we measure, and a c_0 which is the true speed of light, the one used in relativity. The neutrinos interact less than photons, so they can get closer to c_0 than light itself. Someone even calculated that the effect should be close to what is observed at OPERA, but it seemed to use a lot of handwaving to get the right result.
Like I said, fun stuff! To read more (I chose these 2 specifically for their names):
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