Okay the conferences and discussion roll on
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-cern-faster-than-light-particle.htmlWhat does give me confidence is those who have recorded the findings don't like them either and want others to check the measurement.
So lets take a leap of faith and discuss what are the options for how such a result can come about.
First you need to know Nuetrinos are weird you perhaps need to do some background on them (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino).
One of the most weird part about Nuetrinos is there flavours and oscillation (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation).
Okay so lets look at the 3 possibilites I see feel free to throw in thoughts.
1.) QM Lorentz-violation effect
QM predicted that nuetrinos may infact travel faster than light because of the weird oscillation by a process called lorentz-violation (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz-violating_neutrino_oscillations). The problem this creates for physics is QM is more fundemental than the physical world something always strongly resisted by many scientists and many of you :-)
2.) Tachyonics is real and possible (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon). The posibility of Nuetrinos being tachyonic was discussed Alan Chodos in 1985 as a test of tachyonics (
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985PhLB..150..431C).
The dislike of tachyonics is along the similar lines to QM above it gives GR/SR causality problems as all the discussed time paradoxes come into being. This may be less of a hassle these days as QM to some degree has closed these violations and if you accept the QM Novikov self-consistency principle (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle) they are completely closed.
3.) We are looking at some weird new physics. The books open on this one throw in your thoughts.
EDIT: WOW the story is everywhere now dominating most of the physics discussions. Quite strange watching a result a few of us were quietly discussing going to headlines around the world.
