By Bob McDonald, Quirks & Quarks

Sources at Science Insider have reported that a loose connection on a fibre-optic cable may have caused erroneous measurements suggesting that neutrinos can travel faster than light (although another report from CERN issued the next day says they may have been going even faster - either way, there were very likely errors wtih the initial results). Once again, Einstein has been proven right and the scientific method proven strong.

When the story emerged last September that a beam of sub-tomic neutrinos traveling between the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and and the Gran Sasso Lab in Italy apparently arrived sooner that they should have, breaking Einstein's unbreakable universal speed limit, the scientists admitted right away that their measurements were likely wrong.

After all, if they showed that faster-than-light travel is possible, the fundamental laws of physics would have to be reconsidered. 

Of course, some dreamers hoped it could also be the first step towards hyper-fast Star-Trek-style warp drive.

The scientists took a cautious approach because, as the late Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." New and novel results must be rigorously and independently repeated to be proven true, and even then, ideas can be shot down. That's how the scientific method works.

This particular experiment was tried again using the same equipment, and the speedy neutrinos still appeared 60 millionths of a second sooner than a beam of light would have.

Unfortunately, no other laboratory in the world was equipped to duplicate the test, so the search continued to find an alternative explanation before anyone was willing to tell the world that everything we know about the universe is wrong.

To their credit, the Italian scientists persevered and now think they may have found the source of the error: a faulty cable connection to a GPS unit used to measure the distance the neutrinos traveled and a computer.

That loose connection could be enough to account for the time difference. When dealing with the speed of light over short distances, it doesn't take much.

The scientists will now have to run another test with the cable firmly attached, but at this point, it looks like the loose cable is the smoking gun.

This is a wonderful demonstration of the scientific method doing what it does best; search for the truth.

Science is our eye on the universe, a tool to try and understand how it works. That's it. When politics, corporate agendas, religious beliefs or ego become involved, the scientific truth can become distorted or ignored.

Anyone who proves that Einstein is wrong will enter the history books, secure university tenure and possibly make a lot of money. That's how huge this discovery could be.  Einstein's theories of gravitation, relativity, and the idea that the speed of light is an unbreakable limit to anything that moves, have stood the test of time since 1905. They also underlie our fundamental understanding of the universe as a whole.

So the temptation is strong when a new and surprising result comes along that goes against Einstein's theories to announce it right away so no one else will take the glory.  But as we have seen on more than one occasion, if the result turns out to be wrong,  it could become a career-ending move accompanied by a shroud of humiliation.

The Italian scientists, in their relentless efforts to uncover the truth, have secured their integrity.

At the same time, a similar scientific caution is taking place at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which was the source of the neutrino beam. Just before the new year scientists there announced they had "glimpsed" the elusive Higgs Boson, the theoretical particle believed to be the reason everything in the universe has mass.

The scientists say glimpsed because again, this is a big discovery, and in order to be proven, the experiments have to be run again and again.

This process of caution and skepticism in the scientific method makes it look like ideas are constantly being shot down, that as soon as one scientist makes an announcement, another says the opposite so it looks like no one knows whats going on. In fact, this process of healthy debate, backed by solid experimental evidence, builds a pyramid of knowledge that reaches for the ultimate universal truth.

The scientific method has been building pyramids for centuries, which is why, when it is ignored or manipulated for political or other reasons, it's an injustice.