62 billionth of a second? That seems incredible, did they use a stopwatch?

The key point is that their possible implications of their results are so

revolutionary that the CERN team took the extraordinary step of announcing their finding early - principally in order to spur other researchers to try and replicate their new developments. The normal route to alert other researchers to a new unusual result would have been for the CERN Team to send a new developments letter to _Nature_. But the CERN team feels their result is so important that they are holding a press conference to get the word out to their colleagues ASAP.

Note that Einstein's speed limit c applies to light traveling in a vacum and not through all substances. Almost all substances, like air, slow the speed of light to below c. A few can slow light down to almost a speed of 0.

However, when light travels through a few exceptional materials - it travels _at faster than c_. This has been known experimentally for many years.

Whitehouse, D (19 July 2000). "Beam Smashes Light Barrier". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/841690.stm

All of this is in the category of anomalous experimental results - like zero-point energy - that no one really understands. Anomalous results are the grist of future revolutions in scientific theory, e.g. - the anomalous period of the orbit of Mercury spurred Einstein to advance classical Newtonian mechanics to relativity theory.

Clear Skies - Kurt

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