CERN claims faster-than-light particle measured

• A fundamental pillar of physics that nothing can go faster than the speed of light appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein's theories.
• Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos travelling faster than light. That's something that according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity the famous E=mc2 equation just doesn't happen.
• "The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva.
• CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometres) away in Italy travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.
• The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.
• A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN.
• Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.
• 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. "It has worked perfectly up until now."