The news is truly extraordinary. A beam of neutrinos sent from the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron to the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso in Italy has traveled faster than light. In travelling the 730 km between the two laboratories neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds less than light. It’s not much but the measurements were performed with the Opera detector use very high-precision instruments, have been tested to eliminate any possible error and have been confirmed.

Neutrinos are a family of particles among the most difficult to study because they interact very weakly with matter. Their existence was theorized in 1930 by physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the name was coined by physicist Enrico Fermi, but it wasn’t until 1956 that their existence was confirmed experimentally.

For many years it was thought that neutrinos were massless instead in recent years some experiments have shown that they have a mass, even if extremely little.

Now this experiment shows that neutrinos can travel faster than light. Obviously similar experiments will be conducted to verify these results because one of the basics of scientific research is repeatability. If new experiments will give different results they’ll have to recheck everything that was done between the laboratories of CERN and Gran Sasso to understand where’s the difference, otherwise scientists will conclude for good that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light and they’ll try to understand the why.

This news was often reported with sensationalism, sometimes already taking for granted that Einstein’s theory of relativity can be discarded, reporting various inaccuracies. In particular, many articles wrote that according to the theory of relativity it’s impossible that a particle travels faster than light. Actually the problem is that to reach the speed of light it would take infinite energy but in theory it would be possible to have a particle faster than light since its birth.

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It was hypothesized the existence of particles faster than light called Tachyons but their existence poses some problems such as as a mass expressed in complex numbers and the transmission of information faster than light.

The news of faster than light neutrinos created great sensation because it’s an experimental result, not a mere theory. It should be noted that the theory of relativity has been tested and verified countless times in the last century, it will take more than that before we discard it.

It’s true that an advanced a theory that includes quantum effects and relativistic effects definitely could go beyond the theory of relativity the way it went beyond Newton gravitational law. For now we wait for new experiments and see what comes out.