Time will say

Long,long ago,nobody cared/ that E was really mc squared,/ then Albert Einstein thought a bit/ and felt that he should mention it.” That bit of kiddy verse was a reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity,one that roughly posits that at the speed of light,times comes to a standstill,to zero,and mass becomes infinite. The special theory of relativity states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light,which is the universe’s speed limit,and much of modern physics rests on that assumption.

Now,it turns out that light may,just perhaps,be outraced. Experimenting with the Large Hadron Collider,the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (known by its French name,CERN) may have stumbled across a stupendous fact of our world — that certain subatomic articles can exceed the speed of light. Neutrinos are simply tiny particles that float through the earth indifferently,through objects and people,every second. But these neutrinos,sent from CERN to a laboratory in Italy,arrived a few billionths of a second sooner than light.

The CERN scientists have been pinching themselves for six months trying to believe the results,which are so significant and seemingly absurd that they have been put out very tentatively,to see if they can be verified. Much of the scientific world has responded with wariness and wonder,with the disclaimer that it is far more likely that the study was inaccurate than that the foundations of physics are now shaky. Given that any confirmation or refutation will take many months,even a few years,we can only speculate about the ramifications of this finding. It would upend ideas of time and causality,allow chronological order to bend back. If CERN’s findings do turn out to be true,at least we know science fiction has long intuited what science might eventually find.