A potential problem with special relativity? I do think that people are too quick to say "never" to things like FTL travel. There's still a lot we don't understand about the universe. Probably much more than we do, in fact.

Rand these people are just relativity deniers! The science was settled a long time ago and the concensus is that Einstein is right. Special Relativity is an undeniable inconveinient truth. These scientists need to be brought up on charges, they are as bad as holocaust deniers and should be treated as such. When will you learn that science is a popularity contest and since Einstein was popular and outspoken he must be right. These scientists are just in the employ of all those Star Trek fans who want FTL to be true and will so amything to make it so.

sarcasm off

Watch out, Discovery Science channel may soon call for the disenfranchisement of all relativity deniers.

Veeerry interesting. That makes FTL communication, a possibly workable time machine design and a hole in relativity - all in the same month.

Hang onto your hats folks - the ride might get bumpy!

Of course, if this ends up allowing easy release of GUT-scale energy, then we might discover the answer to the Fermi Paradox - the hard way. Especially with the world's current "leadership".

This isn't a new problem with relativity, it's an old one, and the problem is the conflict with quantum mechanics at very small distances and very large energies.

It's exciting not because it realistically suggests human-scale objects might be able to go faster than the universe's speed limit (which so far only light in a vacuum can reach) -- it doesn't -- but because if the anomaly exists it can be used to probe how relativity and QM become incompatible at high energies. Experimental details on this breakdown are otherwise nearly nonexistent.

Experimental results might finally allow a theoretical unification of general relativity and QM ("quantum gravity"). And if that happens, the physicists all throw a gargantuan party, drink lots of weak beer, and wake up the next morning with a headache and no purpose in life.

Weak beer? A slander, sir! More likely Big Gulps of Everclear.

I blame this dependence of the space-time continuum on photon energy on:

Hurricane Katrina, and therefore on

The Coming Ice Age (TM), er, Global Warming (TM), er, Global Climate Change (TM)

And therefore on

George W. Bush

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Sarcasm? I don't need no steenkin' sarcasm!

Are they *absolutely* sure that the higher energy gamma rays weren't generated later? It seems to be a rather commonplace thing for a reaction to ramp up and down in energy, rather than releasing one steady state spread all at once.

Beam me in Scottinski!

General relativity gives no mechanism for gravity. That is one problem. Special relativity is on it's last legs and was Eistein's dictation to the universe, not a discovery. There is a documentary coming out in 2008 about all this called "Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year". Most scientists who do "real" work versus "theoretical" take all the relativity, big bang, wormholes, and dark matter with a grain of salt. Sometime, somewhere faster than light speed will become a reality, special relativity will be dead, and someone will REALLY find out what gravity is. It certainly is not "space" or "time" or "space time".

General relativity gives no mechanism for gravity.

You get 10 points on the Baez Crankpot Index (item 17). Congratulations!