A few weeks ago on campus, it was common to hear that “CERN broke physics.” Over many thousands of attempts and three years of study, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) had routinely noticed that neutrinos fired from CERN had arrived at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) detector in northern Italy several nanoseconds faster than the speed of light.

To understand why this is such a groundbreaking discovery, one must first understand why absolutely nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Albert Einstein postulated his theories of relativity, both of which describe the relationship of space and time and defined the speed of light in a vacuum as a constant in the universe.

This statement had one very unusual spin-off: the mutability of time. Essentially, time is not constant throughout the universe; it flows at different rates depending on the velocity of the object being observed. Essentially, special relativity can describe how an object traveling at close to the speed of light ages slower than something traveling at much lower speeds.

Mountains of evidence support this observation: The GPS in your iPhone relies on much more complicated general-relativistic calculations in order to achieve the accuracy needed determine your location on Earth. Further, quantum physics tells us that not only is the speed of light the de facto “local” speed limit to the universe (barring nonlocal phenomena, such as predicted wormholes, the Alcubierre drive, and quantum entanglement for you science fiction fanatics out there), it takes infinite energy to accelerate something with any mass whatsoever to the speed of light.

That much information allows us to proceed to the Italian OPERA detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, and to understand why this is such a monumental discovery. Neutrinos are remnants of nuclear processes, and are very, very light but, nonetheless, have a tiny mass. They also rarely interact with normal matter because they are electromagnetically neutral and only interact with matter according to the weak nuclear force and gravitational interaction, which could be a large part of the reason why this phenomenon was not observed until recently.

Indeed, most scientists are baffled as to how this could have occurred and have postulated theories as to how this could happen. Perhaps the most fascinating and difficult to prove, speculations cite this as proof of the extra-dimensional string theory, in which all matter is simply the vibration of one-dimensional “cosmic strings.” Physicists speculate that these neutrinos did not actually violate relativity; they simply traveled through another dimension in which the distance between CERN and the Gran Sasso detector was much shorter.

Such a theory leaves Einstein’s universe, one limited to three spatial and one time dimension. In the end, however, it is far too early to understand exactly how big of an impact this discovery will have, or if it was not some incredible systematic error in the CERN calculation that they happened to miss. Rather than calling it a certain and definite breakthrough, CERN has sent the call out for further investigations to similar facilities in Japan and Chicago to conduct similar investigations. However, even then, a century worth of evidence will not be overturned by a few experiments. With all this confusion, it is pretty unlikely that all of physics as we know it will be overturned. Nonetheless, I will continue to hold out hope, no matter how unlikely (and it is very unlikely) that this will result in a workable faster-than-light engine.