Can We Have the Enterprise Now?

So researchers at CERN have broken the speed of light, but only with neutrinos.

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster. That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works. The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy . . . 

The findings were such a shock that CERN’s scientists spent months checking their data before making their announcement. But they have asked American and Japanese teams to confirm the results before they are declared an actual discovery. The data will also be put online overnight so that it can be scrutinised by experts across the world.

So I guess we can have starships, if they’re made of neutrinos, and they’d arrive at Alpha Centauri a few seconds ahead of anything traveling at the speed of light.

Now I’m looking with trepidation to the really bad science fiction that’s going to be written around this idea.

In the meantime, Kathy reminded me of this poem by John Updike.

Neutrinos they are very small

They have no charge and have no mass

They do not interact at all

The earth is just a silly ball to them

Through which they simply pass.

Like like dust maids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

(There’s more to this poem, I just quoted the good parts.)