Some scientists think they've clocked some neutrinos (y'know, things that are kinda like electrons except that they carry no electrical charge) moving faster than the speed of light. Apparently, these particular neutrinos exceeded the supposedly absolute speed limit by .0025 percent, which is like going 55.1375 mph in a 55 mph zone. That wouldn't be enough to earn you a ticket in most places, but scientists tend to make more accurate measurements than cops.

Now, it's possible that the scientists made a mistake. In fact, that's exactly what the scientists said when they made their provisional announcement. But many folks are making this out to be a big deal. After all, you can't go faster than the speed of light.

Well, who says?

Einstein, of course, and a whole lot of other scientists. That's who. Smart folks who know a thing or two about how the universe works. And I mean that literally. Even with our "advanced" science, we know almost nothing about the universe. Most of the universe is made up of what humans call "dark matter" and "dark energy." We call those things "dark" because we don't know what they are. Our equations and theories call for "dark," but we have very little physical evidence of the existence of the "dark," and the small amount we do have that we have is in dispute.

In a very real sense, we don't know nothin' about the universe. Our entire 21th century conception of the universe is probably completely wrong. But we may never quite figure all that out, because we're humans and we have to explain things in ways that humans understand. We call our notion of the start of the universe "the big bang" largely because humans like to blow shit up. If we were a bit less circumspect about sex, we might call it "the big ejaculation" or, more prosaically, "the big spooge."

But even more specifically, our science is written largely in the language of mathematics. Some claim that all advanced cultures across our universe should be able to communicate mathematically, but I can't understand why they would think that. My confusion goes far beyond any notion of bases (these days, most humans other than hardcore computer geeks use base 10 mathematics, but that's hardly the only base used by humans throughout written history). It seems to me that even ideas as apparently fundamental as points and lines might be awfully hard for an extraterrestrial civilization to understand.

So maybe things (okay, very small things, but things nonetheless) can go faster than the speed of light. And maybe they can't, and this is simply another example of people screwing up. It's hard to say, and we won't know for sure for a few years. Things will have calmed down considerably before a confident verdict is reached.

Now, some of you might take this "we don't know" stuff apply it to human notions of evolution or climate change or whatnot. You might want to take "we don't know" to the final frontier of absurdity. You wouldn't be alone in that impulse. But humans, pretty much alone among the species of the Earth, have advanced as far as they have by refusing to allow "we don't know" to serve as an excuse to remain ignorant. Rather, most of us have been inspired by our ignorance to learn more and more about the world (and universe) around us.

Indeed, the main reason civilization as we know it exists today is because a long, long time ago, humans recognized their ignorance and tried to do something about it. That recognition and subsequent rejection of ignorance is one of the glories of humanity. Even if we don't know nothin' 'bout nothin', universally speaking.

Jon Worley doesn't know much about neutrinos, but he does know that a few trillion of those suckers pass through his body every second. He assumes that most of them are good universal citizens and observe the celestial speed limit.