Seriously people, stop with this madness. Everywhere I look, people are making a big fuss out of the results from one of CERN's experiments. People are claiming that "Science is wrong", "Einstein was wrong", "It's time to rewrite the science books".
Have you people forgotten how many times the theory of relativity has been proven right in real world applications? Global Positioning Systems, planetary motions, gravitational time dilation, astrophysical measurements that NASA use for every single space mission - are these merely made up for the sake of scientific entertainment? The equations that explain the electron behaviour that I use everyday when operating a Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) are essentially based on the relativistic quantum mechanics. If the theory of relativity is "wrong", the microscopes shouldn't work. But they are working, and I'm pretty sure they'll still be up and running tomorrow when I go back to work, even though CERN's experiments claim otherwise.
Let's look at these psuedo-scientific claims in detail.
Apparently the guys and girls at CERN found that a bunch of neutrinos traveled a 60-billionth of a second faster than the speed of light when traveling from Switzerland to Italy. Einsteins Relativity theory and our current understanding of the universe is that every thing that moves forward with the arrow of time should be traveling below the speed of light. If it travels faster than the speed of light, then the arrow of time should be pointing backwards for that particle.
Obviously there could have been errors with the experiment and there'll be more teams redoing the experiment to see if there is something amiss with the experimental procedure. But let's for a moment assume that the experiment was right.
To answer the claim "Science is wrong";
Science is not a constant and ultimate body of knowledge; it's a self-correcting process that builds up upon itself. This might come as a shock for those who like to have certainty in their lives (go back to believing in God/reincarnation because science is certainly not for you!) but theories in science are meant to be challenged and even broken.
To answer the claim of "Einstein was wrong";
So what if Einstein was wrong? He was wrong about many things. At a certain point he proclaimed that "God does not play dice with the universe" with regards to the probabilities encountered in Quantum Mechanics. He was [un]certainly wrong there. He was often perplexed about why the quantum world was so different from the world that he saw with the the theory relativity and tried to bridge the gap between the two worlds by creating a Grand Unified Theory. So yes, he is a human being. And he has all the right in the world to be wrong. That doesn't mean anything.
To answer the claim of "rewrite the science books":
There will be no such thing. Did they rewrite science books to reject Newton's laws of gravity when Einstein proposed the theory of relativity? Did they discard Bohr's atomic model when Plank introduced Quantum physics? No, we still use Bohr's atomic model and Newton's laws because for certain simple applications they are sufficient. And as I mentioned earlier, relativity has a heavy bit of application everyday in science and technology, even if it's not applicable to a certain bunch of adamant neutrinons.
And thus the theory of relativity is very very unlikely to be obsolete.
