GENEVA — Scientists at the world's largest physics lab say they have clocked subatomic particles traveling faster than light, a feat that — if true — would break a fundamental pillar of science.

The readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.

"This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, who was not involved in the experiment.

Nothing is supposed to move faster than light, at least according to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity: The famous E (equals) mc2 equation. That stands for energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

But neutrinos — one of the strangest well-known particles in physics — have now been observed smashing past this cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers).

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormity of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.

The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.

A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research.

Katsanevas, who participated in the CERN experiment, said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country's devastating earthquake and tsunami in March.

Scientists agree that if the results are confirmed, it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature, starting with the special theory of relativity proposed by Einstein in 1905.

Special relativity, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang theory about the origins of the universe, underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," Ellis said. "It has worked perfectly up until now."

He cautioned that the neutrino researchers also would have to explain why similar results weren't detected before, such as when an exploding star — or supernova — was observed in 1987.

That is really not the lesson here. If science were truly full of shit these scientists would be trying to rationalize this new information with Einstein's earlier hypothesis.

By the way, this is hardy the first time Einstein has been wrong. Einstein thought that the Universe was contracting, we now know (or at least with a fair amount of certainty suspect) that the Universe is in fact expanding. The great thing about science is that proving someone wrong is never a bad thing.

Someone will certainly try to do that. That person will likely be a bad scientist at best, or an outright moron at worst.

You are welcome to go faster than the speed of light if you have a method for doing so. Don't let Einstein stop you.

No. Einstein was TOLD by astronomers of his day that the universe was static. So he added a cosmological constant to his equations to make things come out static (since his equations indicated that the universe would NOT be static otherwise).

Not necessarily. The possibility of reconciling the observed results with Einstein should be thoroughly investigated. It's nothing more than preserving Einstein's theory, and then considering other explanations for the observed result. It's just as bad to quickly conclude Einstein was wrong and go from there.

(Although each position has to be adopted provisionally in order to set up experiments and test).

True. Although as I have already said the whole nothing can travel faster than light has never been proven at all and at least to this layman has always seemed totally arbitrary in the first place.