[mootothemax]

There are a few interesting explanations in a Guardian article[1] published today:

Heinrich Paes at Dortmund University and colleagues believe it might be possible for neutrinos to move through hidden, extra dimensions of space and effectively take shortcuts through space-time. "The extra dimension is warped in a way that particles moving through it can travel faster than particles that go through the known three dimensions of space. It's like a shortcut through this extra dimension. So it looks like particles are going faster than light, but actually they don't."

Another potential explanation for the observation was given by Alan Kostelecky at Indiana University, who has devoted his career to violations of the limiting speed of light. He proposed in 1985 that an energy field that lies unseen in the vacuum might explain the finding. The field allows neutrinos to move faster through space than photons, the particles that make up light.

"It may very well be that neutrinos travel faster than light does in that medium. It is not at all unreasonable that that would be the case."

[1]http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/23/physicists-spe...

[Jach]

Neither sound very good to me, nor are they really explanations. "Hidden" is just as bad as "magic" here. And isn't the second basically the standard aether theory that was soundly defeated at least 100 years ago? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment

[stianan]

I don't understand how warping the extra dimension will make particles appear to move faster.

Is it possible that it is everything else that is moving linearly along a fifth dimension, thus slowing us down, and these neutrinos were moving cleanly through space-time?