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SFI Science Board member and External Professor Seth Lloyd comments on the implications of recent experiments at CERN in which neutrinos were thought to have exceeded light speed.

Read the Live Science article (September 23, 2011)

In an experiment that zapped neutrinos from CERN in Geneva to the INFN Gran Sass Laboratory in Italy, scientists say they clocked the particles outrunning light by 60 nanoseconds over 453.6 miles (730 kilometers). The results triggered both enthusiasm and skepticism in the physics community.

One possible error could be in the calculations the scientists used to correct for the effect of the atmosphere in their experiment, Lloyd said. Light actually gets a bit bogged down when it isn't in a vacuum, while neutrinos zip through the atmosphere without any effect. It's possible that the CERN researchers miscalculated in correcting for the atmospheric effect and that neutrinos aren't actually going faster, but the light is just going a smidge slower than they realize.

Don't get overly excited about time travel quite yet, however, Lloyd cautions in the article. Even if the results are accurate, neutrinos are difficult to harness for practical application.