One of my more recent posts actually discussed that arXiv paper, and a mistake made by the author. Please take a look:

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/11/01/the-opera-measurement-the-peer-review-process/

CERN & OPERA continue to investigate the anomaly, and have safely accounted for all aspects of General Relativity in carrying out their measurement.

Hope this helps,
-Brian

Interesting article, but I thought the issue was solved?
http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/1110.2685v1

Kind regards,
Robin

It may not have been clear, but the OPERA Collaboration in the updated press release say that the neutrino’s are still faster than light:

The beam sent from CERN consisted of pulses three nanoseconds long separated by up to 524 nanoseconds. Some 20 clean neutrino events were measured at the Gran Sasso Laboratory, and precisely associated with the pulse leaving CERN. This test confirms the accuracy of OPERA’s timing measurement, ruling out one potential source of systematic error. The new measurements do not change the initial conclusion. Nevertheless, the observed anomaly in the neutrinos’ time of flight from CERN to Gran Sasso still needs further scrutiny and independent measurement before it can be refuted or confirmed.

When they say “The new measurements do not change the initial conclusion.” They mean that their initial results saying the neutrinos traveled faster than light by 60 +/- 10 ns were again observed using this new shorter proton beam to make the neutrino beam. See their updated manuscript in the arXiv.org link above for more details.

Hope this helps clarify things.

Best,
-Brian

“”Some 20 clean neutrino events were measured at the Gran Sasso Laboratory, and precisely associated with the pulse leaving CERN. This test confirms the accuracy of OPERA’s timing measurement, ruling out one potential source of systematic error. The new measurements do not change the initial conclusion.”"

While I’m not a theorist, I do know that if this phenomenon is confirmed by other experiments it will definitely take a series of completely new ideas to describe the experimental observation.

But our current understanding of Relativity tells us that as objects speed up, their internal clocks slow down with respect to an object at rest. This causes objects moving faster to actually “time travel” forward in time, rather than backward. This happens to all of us everyday, to a very small affect. When you drive your car or travel in an air plane you are actually travelling forward in time. Unfortunately the affect is very small at slow speeds (only atomic clocks are capable of detecting it).

As I said, we will have to wait and see if the OPERA measurement can be confirmed; only then will we need to consider if Relativity needs to be revised.

Definitely stay tuned though!

Thanks for the contribution.
-Brian

Interesting thought:
Could it be that the neutrino’s are travelling at lightspeed and because of that they go back in time and arrive earlier than expected?

Kind regards,
Nick