O limite da velocidade da luz é aborrecido: torna as viagens interestelares, se não impossíveis à escala da espécie humana, pouco práticas, limitadas e impraticáveis no âmbito da vida de alguém...

... Claro que a FC resolveu o problema especulando a existência de atalhos através de outras dimensões, do dito hiper-espaço. Ora senão que surge a notícia abaixo: talvez Einstein não tenha acertado nesta e haja, efectivamente, um qualquer atalho. Enfim, esperemos pela confirmação, que aliás está a ser pedida por todos, nomeadamente pelos cientistas implicados na descoberta do resultado, como exige a boa prática científica:

Breaking the Speed of Light: It’s been a tenet of the standard model of physics for over a century. The speed of light is a unwavering and unbreakable barrier, at least by any form of matter and energy we know of. Nothing in our Universe can travel faster than 299,792 km/s (186,282 mph), not even – as the term implies – light itself. It’s the universal constant, the “c” in Einstein’s E = mc2, a cosmic speed limit that can’t be broken.

That is, until now.

An international team of scientists at the Gran Sasso research facility outside of Rome announced today that they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The neutrinos, subatomic particles with very little mass, were contained within beams emitted from CERN 730 km (500 miles) away in Switzerland. Over a period of three years, 15,000 neutrino beams were fired from CERN at special detectors located deep underground at Gran Sasso. Where light would have made the trip in 2.4 thousandths of a second, the neutrinos made it in 60 nanoseconds – that’s 60 billionths of a second – a tiny difference to us but a huge difference to particle physicists!

The implications of such a discovery are staggering, as it would effectively undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity and force a rewrite of the Standard Model of physics.