“Flying Pigs Now Ice-Skate in Hell,” says Physicist.

A fundamental pillar of physics – that nothing can go faster than the speed of light – appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein’s theories.

Scientists at the world’s largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos travelling faster than light. That’s something that according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity – the famous E (equals) mc2 equation – just doesn’t happen . . .

CERN now reports that they’ve clocked neutrinos exceeding the speed of light.

Mr. Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.

“They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements,” he said Thursday . . .

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometres) away in Italy travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.

You might not want to start building the Enterprise just yet.  The neutrino is a (mostly) massless particle, so there’s not a lot of M to be multiplied by C-squared to equal E.   Maybe neutrinos get the hall monitor to give them a pass allowing them to run in the corridors.

But now, if you want to start an interstellar civilization, all you have to do is transform yourself into neutrinos, shove off the planet with energies equal to or greater than those of CERN, and somehow re-assemble yourself on the other end.

I’ll try to get started on that this weekend.