Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics at Britain's Manchester University, said the results, if confirmed, would mean it would be possible in theory "to send information into the past."
"In other words, time travel into the past would become possible ... (though) that does not mean we'll be building time machines any time soon," he told Reuters.
The international physicists who made the startling findings at CERN near Geneva said they must now be confirmed by independent research teams. The wider scientific community expressed astonishment and skepticism.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is an extraordinary claim," cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees told Reuters.
CERN, also home to the Large Hadron Collider that is probing how the universe began and developed, said measurements over three years had shown invisible neutrino particles covering the 730 km to a laboratory in Italy 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- faster than light.
That reading could show that Albert Einstein, father of modern physics, was wrong when he laid down in his 1905 theory of special relativity that the speed of light was a "cosmic constant," and nothing could go faster.
The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) tunnel,
located at the CERN particle research centre near Geneva, is seen in
this undated handout photograph. An international team of scientists
said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling
faster than light a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's
long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe. The totally unexpected
finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment
dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near
Geneva and the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.
REUTERS/CERN-INFS/Handout
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