Going off topic… the ever sensationalist press is slaughtering yet another science story, with headlines such as Scientists testing light speed affirm Einstein maybe wrong.

Inevitably, complex problems cannot be reduced beyond a certain level of simplicity without missing some key points, and that is happening here.

First, this latest round of experimentation is by the same group and they haven’t necessarily tested all the objections raised.

More importantly as far as the physics goes, these news stories miss some rather subtle but important points. For example, it’s not all neutrinos but just a particular kind of neutrino that is being studied, one with a mass so small that it has never been accurately measured! This is important because the speed of light barrier technically doesn’t apply to massless particles, e.g., photons themselves go the speed of light and have no mass.

So the “physics” that may need to be modified may very well not be “Einstein” but of what “mass” means as far as the standard model (SM) of particles and matter. It is expected that the LHC would lead to new discoveries that could lead to modifying the SM, which is why the LHC was built in the first place!

For example, just a few days ago, one team reported results from an experiment that might give us an understanding of why matter, and not anti-matter, dominates the universe. These are the sort of questions for which multi-billion dollar experiments like the LHC are built.

Sensationalism is the antithesis of knowledge and understanding.