Referencing back to this thread, http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/216165/1/What-is-truth-COULD-Einstein-Have-Been-Wrong....
I was doing some reading on the neutrino thing and I discovered somthing I didn't know, a subtle but important distinction I think a lot of us get wrong about relativity and nothing being able to move faster than the speed of light.
There are two theories of relativity from Einstein, general and special. General relativity (GR) describes gravity, gravity wells, the expansion of the universe, gravitional lensing, among other things. Special relativity (SR) describes things like mass-energy equivalence (e=mc^2), the expansion of the universe and spacetime itself.
SR doesn't say nothing can go faster than the speed of light (C in the equation). It says that nothing can break the light speed barrier if it has a positive rest mass. This is because as speed increases, mass increases proportionally and passing from sub to superlimunal speed would require an object to travel AT the speed of light at which point motion would require infinite energy because the object would have infinite mass. The same is true for an object with positive rest mass passing from super to sub luminal speeds.
Photons, when they are created, are created AT the speed of light in a vacumn. They can go slower if traveling through a medium, but never faster. They have a zero rest mass.
Neutrinos, however, have an unknown speed at the time of their creation. They DO have mass. If, at the time of their creation, they are ALREADY moving faster than the speed of light, relativity is not broken at all.
Because neutrinos are electrically neutral, they passt through matter without interacting with it. Almost 65 billion solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the earth exposed to sunlight, pass out the other side and stream into space. We detect them when they DO interact with a proton, are absorbed and create a positron and electron, which annihilate each other almost immediately and give off gamma rays we can detect.
Now, should the measurements taken that show them moving faster than the speed of light turn out to be correct, it STILL doesn't mean that SR is wrong (neutrinos have mass, remember), it may mean that they are a type of matter that has mass, but not in the way we traditionally think of it and there is something more to be discovered about what mass means. It might mean that neutrinos can never be at rest, as soon as they interact with a proton they convert into something else without ever slowing down, it might mean they interact with a proton and turn it into an election and and a positron and keep moving.
Most importantly, if the measurements are correct, it's doesn't at ALL necessarily mean that Einstein was wrong, just that he was incomplete. And we already knew that.
Or maybe they measured wrong.