The neutrinos in question undertook a journey from CERN in Geneva, through the Earth, and finally ended up at the Gran Sasso laboratory deep underneath the mountain of the same name in Italy. The neutrinos were produced by the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN, along with a lot of other sub-atomic particles. The trick particle physicists use to get a beam of only neutrinos, and the reason the detector for the experiment is located so far away from the source of the beam, is to send the beam of particles off to travel underground for several miles. Neutrinos are the only particles that survive the journey, because they pass through matter completely unscathed whereas the others do not. The now pure neutrino beam takes less than 3 milliseconds to travel the 730km between CERN and Gran Sasso, and the neutrinos are detected by apparatus belonging to the OPERA experiment, consisting of around 150,000 bricks of photographic film interleaved with lead plates.

The neutrinos, says the paper released by the OPERA experiment after the news was first broken, reached the detector 60 nanoseconds before they would have done had they been travelling at the speed of light. The result amounts to a statistical significance of 6-sigma. “Sigma” is shorthand for standard deviation, a statistical tool that can be used to give an estimate of the certainty of a result. Generally, the higher the number of sigma, the more trustworthy the result. A minimum of 5-sigma, equivalent to a one in 1,744,278 chance that the result is a fluke, is normally required to claim a discovery. 6-sigma, equivalent to a one in 506,797,346 chance is even more convincing.

- Extract from the article "Faster-than-light neutrinos show science in action", by Kelly Oakes and published in Scientific American Magazine, published online on September 23rd, 2011. Read the whole thing here.

If it turns out to be true, this is a pretty big deal for science.

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're O.K.

The Moments are more intense if you've played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We've all got our examples. Here is one. It's the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There's a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today's power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner…until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer's scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi's moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer's still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball's heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there's no time to turn his body around, and Agassi's following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side…and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball's past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi's side, a winner — Federer's still dancing backward as it lands. And there's that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man's headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), "How do you hit a winner from that position?" And he's right: given Agassi's position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of "The Matrix." I don't know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

- extract from "Federer as Religious Experience", by David Foster Wallace from Play Magazine in August 2006, revisited by Michael McCambridge in 'Director's Cut', from grantland.com.

Read the whole thing here. I highly recommend it.

Tonight, August 17th 2011, we head north and play in Opelika, AL, at a fantastic venue called Eighth and Rail. Our last show there was excellent, so I'm very much looking forward to this one...

Also, just in case you thought war around the world was worse than ever before, this article by Joshua S. Goldstein at ForeignPolicy.com may make you think again.

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

- extract from "The Elusive Big Idea", by Neal Gabler, published in The New York Times Sunday Review, August 13th 2011.

It's true: where have all the big ideas gone? Read the whole thing here: nytimes.com.

When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

- extract from the article "The High Cost Of Low Teacher Salaries", by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari, from The New York Times, published April 30th, 2011.

via nytimes.com