Captain Zeno Goes Faster Than Light!

We humans don't like the word "impossible", which is why, no matter how unlikely it is that the neutrino anomaly will lead to faster-than-light spaceships, I, for one, have my fingers crossed. Let us imagine, for the sake of an SF thought experiment, that Captain Zeno is on the bridge, ready to begin humanity's first voyage to Delta Pavonis. He's plotted his course as accurately as possible, but over 20 light years, the margin of error is pretty vast. Worse than that, when you're going faster than light, you can't see where you're going. How can he steer?

Fortunately, there's an answer. Halfway there, he stops, checks his position and corrects his course. After half the remaining distance, he does it again, and keeps doing it until he's close enough to Delta Parvonis to go the rest of the way at a normal speed.

I call this Zenonian Navigation, after Zeno of Alexandria, who claimed that motion is impossible, because before you can go anywhere, you first have to get halfwat there, and before you can get halfway there... Probably the most obviously wrong idea in the history of maths.

Neutrinos caught speeding!

The big news in physics at the moment is that a beam of neutrinos from CERN has turned up at a particle detector 60ns sooner than should have been physically possible. Did they really travel faster than light? At first glance, most scientists would say that there's probably a flaw in the measurements somewhere, but the team who made the discovery had spent 2 years checking the results before they published them. However, if neutrinos really were travelling faster than light, we should have detected neutrinos from a supernova 5 years before the light from the explosion. (What if some did arrive that early and nobody noticed?) More exotic theories are going about. According to some versions of string theory, the universe we know is a four dimensional strcture called a brane (short for membrane) embedded in a higher dimensional bulk. If the brane is slightly curved, neutrinos could take a short cut across the bulk.

So, have we found an exception to relativity? Is this evidence of extra dimensions? Or will it all come down to experimental error? I know that the latter is most likely, but I want my spaceship!