[watsisname]

Le sigh.

Forgive me for being the pessimist of the group, but I don't buy that for a nanosecond.  Anything moving FTL necessarily involves breaking the theory of relativity, which is one of the most vastly successful theories in 20th century physics.  It's been confirmed so many times it's considered established fact, and indeed the very particle accelerator those researchers are using relies on relativity to work properly.

Here's what bothers me about this news:

"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

No, if he was genuinely trying to get the scientific community to verify his results, then he would have just posted the findings on arXiv or similar scientific circle before drawing a huge media fuss over it.  But as far as I can tell, no such publication of their data/findings yet exists.  What they're doing is a classic example of media grandstanding for the sake of attention.

Edit:  Also io9 has a nice summary of their concerns about it.

[Nuke]

just because relativity was successful and is correct in most cases. doesn't mean that we have a complete picture of how the universe works. this was similar with newtonian physics. it had very practical applications and was responsible for the industrial revolution, yet it had gaping holes in it that were not explained until einstein came around. finding a hole in relativity would actually be a very interesting thing. relativity works quite well, our gps system wouldn't work without it, so if we find a case where it is not doing what its supposed to be doing, it wont invalidate the theory and all its practical applications, but rather open the door for a higher understanding of the universe. that said im not holding my breath. it is likely a glitch in their equipment.

[Mongoose]

What Nuke said, basically.  Even though we now know that Newtonian mechanics is far from a complete picture of objects in motion, it's still immensely practical for most everyday purposes.  In the same way, we may find that special/general relativity breaks down at some point, yet can still be successfully used to predict common phenomena.  (Along the same lines, there's a big part of me really hoping that "dark matter" winds up being some crazy new quirk in how gravity works on very large scales, as opposed to just a bunch of massive stuff that we can't see.)  These particular results are obviously far from certain, but it's worth keeping an ear on them.

[watsisname]

Well sure, I'd be thrilled to see this finding get verified because it certainly would require a profound reworking of theory, but just like Nuke said I'm not holding my breath.

Let me put it this way.  If this result is validated, then we need to explain why our understanding of relativistic kinetic energy is so wrong -- to accelerate a particle of nonzero mass to c requires infinite kinetic energy to be imparted to it.  Yet if this was wrong, then we should have had absolutely no trouble accelerating things past c long ago.

Next you'd have to explain why the mathematics of relativity, particularly the Lorentz transformations, are so wrong, because they show that a particle moving at speeds greater than c is functionally the same as a particle moving backward in time from some reference frames -- this violates causality.  And yet this mathematics works for everything from cars to satellites to space probes to relativistic particles just like the ones we study at the LHC.

And what is so special about these neutrinos, I have to ask?  We've observed neutrinos from supernova SN1987A and their arrival time exactly coincided with what you'd expect from neutrinos produced from the core collapse of the star and radiating outward at exactly the speed of light.  What is it that's making these LHC neutrinos go FTL?  How did they measure this?  What were they doing to cause such a result in the first place?  I have no idea, because I can't even find their data.  Nevermind, here it is.

And I'm really not buying the Newtonian vs. Relativity argument either.  Newtonian physics wasn't based on experiments involving things moving at near light-speed.  Relativity was.  That's why Newtonian physics works well for every day speeds while relativity works for everything.  As you've both mentioned, it's not so much a replacement, but a modification to describe a bigger picture.

This discovery on the other hand -- I can't see how it'd be a modification like Relativity was for Newton.  Rather it would require essentially going back to the drawing board, because as described above, it is completely at odds with what we've already established with relativity.  It would be like finding fossils of homo-sapiens in a precambrian formation.  That would be one hell of an observation to have to work into your theory.

[FireCrack]

^Alternatively, Causality could be thrown out instead.

But I wouldn't like that.

[watsisname]

Actually I'm hoping that's exactly what happens.

I think I recall reading somewhere that space, at the smallest scales of distance/time, might actually be non-causal in nature... or maybe it's non-locality I'm thinking of.  I'd need to look again.

[Bobboau]

another option, what if this is negative energy? IIRC no one is quite sure what that would look like.

[Firstdragon34]

Great! Then we can open a wormhole!