That’s the conclusion from a reexamination of the test data from earlier this year, and new tests by the OPERA team using a lower beam intensity. The lower beam intensity yields sparse results, and so far they’ve gotten only 20 “clean” events. But those events seem to confirm that neutrinos were traveling faster than c. (Faster-than-light neutrinos confirmed by Alan Boyle) They’re also looking at the time reference system (GPS???) as an obvious source of error, and they’re talking about replacing it with a direct fiber optic cable between the two sites. That’d be a smart move. Why complicate a physics experiment by requiring an n-body orbital computation as part of the results?

When this first was reported earlier this year, my pet theory was that the neutrinos were surfing on an Alcubierre wave front, the phenomenon behind the Acubierre drive that fleshes out the Star Trek warp drive notion. I read the description of neutrinos traveling “close” to the speed of light and being “nearly” massless, and those seem like the perfect conditions to warp space asymmetrically in the vicinity of the particle, mostly behind it because so close to c the information about the mass distortion is overrun by the particle and can’t propagate far ahead of it.

Or something like that. Sounds nice and sciencey, doesn’t it?

The controversy is far, far from over. This is a second report from the same team, so it gets less street cred than an independent experiment. That’ll take time, probably years more.