Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. The Cern team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, and sends them through the Earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos. CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. "We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement," said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. "When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'."
– It's enough to make Einstein's hair stand up: Physicists at CERN think they've spotted neutrinos traveling faster than light, reports AP. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity—his E=MC2 equation—nothing should be able to go that fast. At Wired, Adrian Cho doesn't mince words: "If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century." It's so jarring in the world of science—the BBC explains that modern physics depends on the notion that the "the speed of light is the universe's ultimate speed limit"—that the researchers themselves are asking other scientists to try to duplicate the findings before proclaiming them to be true. "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," says a CERN spokesman. Chicago's Fermilab says it will begin its own experiments immediately.