At first, I leaned towards some sort of dull error that would invalidate the result. But looking at it a bit more carefully, this seems increasingly unlikely. The reasoning is that there are only two measurement errors that are possible: the time the neutrinos took and the distance between the endpoints. The errors needed in either case are rather large (about 18m, by my calculations, or about 60ns). Not only this, but dozens of scientists have been more aware of this for months and desperately trying to find where the error was. It's not as if they were trying to prove neutrinos went faster than light, they were actually studying oscillations between muon neutrinos and taon neutrinos.
Hence, my feeling is there is a fairly good chance this is a genuine result. If it is, it is probably the biggest result in experimental physics for decades.
Perhaps it's a bit early to hazard a guess as to what mankind might gain from the knowledge!
Hi all, I'm sure you all know about the neutrinos travelling 20 parts per million faster than light at CERN . What are your thoughts ? Have CERN made a mistake ? A breakthrough ? If the reports are correct , then what can mankind gain from this knowledge ?