The speed of light: if only...

So Albert Einstein was the class dunce after all, and there really is something that is faster than light. Scientists at Cern, the European nuclear research centre, have been firing neutrinos across the Alps from France to Italy for three years. Now they tell us that these electrically neutral subatomic particles have moved “at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light”.

Here’s hoping that the boffins are right. Einstein argued, as part of his theory of relativity, that travelling at greater than the speed of light would mean that time is going backwards. So investors will be able to return to the status quo ante: before Lehman Brothers. UBS will not have suffered that $2.3bn loss. The eurozone will not even exist. And it will have turned out that God, all along, has been playing dice with the universe.

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