You want my text msg now -- or yesterday?

"Zounds!" as Shakespeare would lustily declare, has quantum science just thrown Albert Einstein under a bus? Maybe so. It seems European physicists at CERN plan to announce that they have "clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905," according to the New York Times. Suddenly, the shocked physics world is "bethump'd with words." If true (and that's a big if), then it's a complete game changer.

The Times reported that physicists raced the neutrinos a distance of 450 miles at a speed 60 nanoseconds faster than light could travel (which is 186,000 miles per second). Though the speed increase is slight, it's still fast enough to turn physics on its head. It would "would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect." For example, if you could transmit something faster than light, you could -- to paraphrase Einstein -- send a text message to the past.

But, as the Times writes, "Incredible claims require incredible evidence." Scientists are of course skeptical and rigorous independent experiments have yet to be conducted. Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN, told the Times, “If it is true, then we truly haven’t understood anything about anything. It looks too big to be true. The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.” Spoken like a true scientist. But to an artist or poet, the fact that "it looks too big to be true" could be precisely the quality that may make it true.

The biggest scientific discoveries tend also to be the most elegant. They are, as Professor Ian Glynn (author of "Elegance in Science") put it, "simple, ingenious, concise and persuasive; they often have an unexpected quality, and they are very satisfying." One wonders whether "too big to be true" is actually that "unexpected quality." To paraphrase one of Glynn's examples, perhaps the skeptics will one day mimic the reaction of Thomas Henry Huxley who after reading Darwin's account of evolution remarked, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” God may not play dice with the universe, as Einstein believed. But if he does, then the scientists at CERN may have just unraveled the mechanics of one of his rolls. We'll know soon enough. And what if the discoverers of faster than light speed are proven right? I don't know about you, but only one phrase will leap to my mind: "Holy shit! Awesome."