Faster Than A Speeding Photon

The headlines remain the same: "Faster Than Light Neutrinos".

The problem is not (or need not be) the experimental set up, or the data. A significant problem is that there is no theoretical basis for the headline. One can certainly say, in a relatively neutral way, that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than the photons. There is nothing wrong with translating the data in that way because, for example, the neutrinos might have departed 60 nanoseconds earlier than the photons. But as soon as you start saying the neutrinos are "traveling faster than light" (or even appearing to do so) you are automatically proposing that each and every other way of describing (or explaining) the data has been eliminated.

It's very much like a magician's trick where the magician performs a trick (faster than light particles) and challenges you to work out how they did it (the explanation), except that the magician, in this case, doesn't know how they did it (how to explain it). So instead they describe/explain it from the point of view of the audience - as a woman was being cut in half, or particles traveling faster than light.

Each and every other way of explaining the data must be eliminated before you can describe it in terms of faster than light particles - but even then, an FTL description (that the particles are traveling faster than light) will still be no more than a roundabout way of saying that one does not know how to describe the data.

The experiment is nevertheless interesting because the experimental equivalent of "exhausting alternative explanations" is what experimenters would call "calibration". And if they have correctly calibrated the set up, then they will have effectively eliminated all alternative explanations.

What would follow is then the much more daunting task - how to explain faster than light neutrinos. It's not just a case of saying - oh, Einstein is wrong and that's all there is to it. If particles can be observed to travel faster than light then there is an opportunity to "test" the theoretical frameworks in which particles do travel faster than light. Indeed, even Relativity Theory allow particles to travel faster than light (although neutrinos wouldn't be one of them).

Theoretical physics is about discovering the rules, not the exceptions. At the moment, FTL particles are the exception. Which means, from a theoretical physics point of view, there has not yet been any discovery.