The day the world stopped making sense

Well I might just be stating the obvious here, but just let me get this out first: WHHHHAAAAATTTTTT???

Alright, moving on.

1 neutrino. 1 experiment. 16,000 runs. 1 conclusion: somewhere along the line, someone screwed up. Now the question is who?

I'm not making much sense am I? Alright, here it is.

One of the most important concepts in modern physics is the fact that the maximum velocity (or is it speed? hmm that does put things into perspective...) that can be reached in the universe is 3 * 10^8 m/s or the speed of light or if you will, the speed reached by a photon in a vacuum. But a recent experiment done at CERN in conjunction with a lab in Italy revealed that when they sent a muon neutrino from one lab to the other, it had arrived 60 ns faster than light would have. And that does not make sense on so many levels. First of all, neutrinos have a mass (albeit a very small one) while photons do not. So inertia would predict that it is impossible to accelerate a particle so as to give it the speed of light because the more it is accelerated, the more massive it becomes, the more it will oppose further acceleration, etc. Also, at the speed of light, time is supposed to stop. Does that mean that by going faster, you go back in time? No, no, no! The faster you go, the more time contracts. But it can't contract more than 0....

So it all boils down to this: either the experiment at CERN was somehow flawed and the results are wrong, either Einstein screwed up and the last 100 years of physics need to be revised. Either way, an institution that I profoundly respect fails (because Einstein is an institution within himself!).

And this has nothing to do with the topic, but did you know that Einstein means "one stone" in German? One stone in the foundation of modern physics? One stone gone astray? One stone traveling through space-time at the speed of light?