As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
This famous maxim for caution was apparently overlooked by Italian physicist Dr Antonio Ereditato, while working on an experiment that last September made news headlines. His team claimed to find that neutrinos may travel faster than light. The neutrinos were beamed under the Earth's crust from the CERN particle collider near Geneva, 730 kilometres away. By just believing it possible, he would have dismantled the keystone of Einstein's theory of relativity. His weak proofs spelled his doom. With his reputation in tatters, on March 30 he resigned as director of the INFN laboratory under the Gran Sasso Mountain in Italy.
Some faulty instruments seem to have caused false readings.
The dream of finding something faster than light is old. The first to think about this possibility was German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld in 1904. We even have a name for such hypothetical particles: tachyons. In Greek, it stands for 'fast', with the name used first by Gerald Feinberg in 1967. The problem is that no one had ever found or seen tachyonic particles, or even explained in a credible way their possible existence.
The possibility that neutrinos can travel faster than light is not new. It was theoretically proposed in 1985 by Canadian physicist Dr Alan Chodos, using what is called 'Lorenz invariance violation', but he was roundly criticised by his colleagues for even raising it in a scientific paper.
The measurement of the speed of light is a French achievement: we own it to Armand H.L. Fizeau. He discovered it in 1849, with the help of his assistant, Jean Foucault. Foucault is today remembered mainly for his pendulum, a simple experiment that proves that our planet is rotating.