‘Faster than light’ particles threaten Einstein

Sub-atomic particles apparently travelling faster than light could force a major rethink of theories about how the cosmos works and even allow dreams of time travel and extra dimensions, scientists said on Friday.

Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics at Britain's Manchester University, said the results, if confirmed, would mean it would be possible in theory "to send information into the past".

"In other words, time travel into the past would become possible ... (though) that does not mean we'll be building time machines any time soon," he told reporters.

The international physicists who made the startling findings at CERN near Geneva said they must now be confirmed by independent research teams. The wider scientific community expressed astonishment and scepticism.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is an extraordinary claim," cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees said.

CERN, also home to the Large Hadron Collider that is probing how the universe began and developed, said measurements over three years had shown invisible neutrino particles covering the 730 km to a laboratory in Italy 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- faster than light.

That reading could show that Albert Einstein, father of modern physics, was wrong when he laid down in his 1905 theory of special relativity that the speed of light was a "cosmic constant", and nothing could go faster.