After all, Neutrinos have this little thing called "mass" (which, we don't quite know how much that is, mind you), it is > 0.
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| Lorentz Transformation for Mass |
Do me and yourself a favor: 1 pound = 0.454 kilograms. Do that with your weight. I promise not to look.
Now make yourself travel at ~ 0.99c, plug it into your calculator and see what comes out. Even staying at one pound, the observed mass comes to ~ 3.21 kg. Mass, or "stuff" causes drag; slows everything, even a Neutrino -- down. For the case of v = c, your calculator would register an "error": division by zero yields infinite ( ∞ ) mass for any object, thereby needing infinite energy to propel any mass to the speed of light. Even that feat would require the literary invention of the Trek Inertial Damper.
Mind you, Special Relativity doesn't say a particle can't travel faster than light: like light always traveling at the speed of light and having no "mass"/inertia to drag it down (let massoriginal for a photo = 0, because for photons: it does), tachyons would just always travel faster than light and have "imaginary rest mass" (like imaginary numbers, the error when you take the square root of -1). So...it gets a little strange, even to Einstein (the quote references a debate with Neils Bohr over Quantum Mechanics, that he ironically helped to create).
My advice: remain calm. These things kind of work themselves out in the long run.
1. Discovery magazine link (with some trepidation):
Rest Easy, Einstein -- Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Would Not Violate Relativity
2. Neutrino Mass
3. Wikipedia: Neutrino
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