First of course are the obligatory ifs: If the results are upheld, and if the reason the neutrinos are getting there too soon is because they are jumping into the bulk, then:
I can think of no particular reason why there should be any time reversal during the passage of the neutrinos through the bulk. This is not the same thing as the proposed tachyon. The tachyon always travels faster than the speed of light. A particle traveling in the bulk would have no reason to travel faster than the speed of light. It is just that things, including light, travel faster in the bulk than they do in the brane. When the neutrinos jump into the bulk they would sped up, but not turn back in time. The light cone would presumably be pretty much the same. It might have a different slope, but I'm not enough of a physicist to be able to say much about that. Anyway after the neutrinos had traveled a short distance in the bulk something (gravity?) would pull them back into the brane, and they would just wind up have taken a sort of a short cut from the place they started to the place they ended up. You know, like getting off of the city streets and onto the freeway for a little way. If there isn't a back up on the freeway you may make better time than if you stopped at all the lights on the city street.
Now then, excluding the travel through the bulk situation. The idea of sending information back in time does run into the standard time travel paradox. The information would cause changes that would make the information false. Plus of course if they traveled back in time there would be a transfer of energy back in time. If that happened then it seems to me there would be a problem with the basics of QM. The uncertainty principle allows a certain amount of variation in the energy balance of the universe. I suppose that could allow very short time travel events, but I doubt if they could amount to as much as the 60 nS reported. 60 nS isn't much time, but compared to typical high energy reactions it is an enormous time. 60 nS is a long time compared to Planck time.
Bill Gill
