Bill's Comments

The big news in science is the publication by CERN that they may have measured neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. Actually what they have measured is their arrival time as slightly sooner than expected, and it computes to moving faster than light.

Immediately everyone is in a twitter over the possibilities of time travel because Special Relativity formulas give negative time values when velocities are faster than the speed of light.

Hold it right there.

This is an instance of something I have discussed before, the equating of a model of reality with reality itself. Special relativity actually is a description of the world when it is measured by light particles, which move at a constant speed in a vacuum. Actually it does not forbid faster than light movement, it simply says we can't measure it with light particles. The new measurements are not based on light but neutrinos which have some very different properties from other particles.

Once all the whoopla dies down and the press goes away to another story they can exploit for the moment, the results will be recast in a number of different hypotheses which will be tested and retested. Out of it will come new descriptions of the world we live in. My guess is that the description of the dimensional structure of the universe will be modified, and possibly time will be treated not as a fourth dimension as it is now, but in some different way. Stay tuned.