The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso experiment sends muon neutrinos through a tunnel at the French-Swiss border in the direction of a detector in Italy, more than 450 miles away. One of the group's experiments, known as OPERA, turned up evidence that neutrinos may travel faster than light.

This year, particle physicists are aiming to get definitive answers to the questions that consumed them last year: Does the Higgs boson, potentially the final fundamental piece of the Standard Model puzzle, actually exist? Could there be new physics beyond the Standard Model, which is arguably the most successful scientific theory of the 20th century?

And just as importantly, can neutrinos really fly faster than light, as findings from Italian lab suggested last year?

"I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time." Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Europe's CERN particle physics center, joked today during a scientific meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Physicists recapped the past year's results and looked ahead to the next year during sessions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — and if their expectations come to pass, 2012 could be a big year for textbook editors.

First, about those neutrinos: Experiments conducted by the OPERA collaboration at CERN on the French-Swiss border and at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory clocked particles traveling the 450 miles (732 kilometers) between the labs at speeds slightly higher than the speed of light. That would run counter to a century's worth of special-relativity experiments, which has led most scientists to suspect some subtle factor went unaccounted for in the experiment. However, the skeptics haven't yet shown definitively where where the OPERA scientists went wrong, which "means that essentially they've done their job," Bertolucci said.

He said there were five efforts under way to re-examine or replicate the OPERA team's experimental results. One such effort would involve the MINOS neutrino experiment headquartered at Fermilab in Illinois. Rob Roser, a staff scientist at Fermilab, said the neutrino test required the installation of more sensitive detection equipment, and now that the equipment is ready, data would be collected in April. The results of the replication efforts should be in hand by the end of the year. 

The faster-than-light effect is so subtle that physicists would find it hard to accept even if a similar effect is detected by other experiments. But Bertolucci recalled that similarly unexpected results from the Michelson-Morley experiment, more than a century ago, eventually led to Albert Einstein's revolutionary work on relativity.

"We have to just keep an open mind," Bertolucci said.

Quest for the Higgs
The discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that could explain the phenomenon of mass and masslessness, is the year's other coming attraction in particle physics. For the past few years, Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider have been in friendly competition to pick up the first hints of the particle's existence. And even though the Tevatron was shut down last September, the teams analyzing the last of their results could still "steal Sergio's thunder," Roser said.

Roser, who is the leader of the Tevatron's CDF collaboration, said scientists were in the "final throes" of data analysis and would announce their results relating to the Higgs boson at a March conference in Italy.

"We will be able to say something interesting, though whether it's that we don’t see it or we do see it remains to be seen," he said.

Late last year, the LHC teams said they saw hints that the Higgs boson might exist at a mass-energy level of 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV. Those hints were too tentative to count as a discovery, however, and it sounds as if the same might hold true for the Tevatron results. Roser said he and his colleagues think the Tevatron's detectors could spot a 125 GeV Higgs boson at a 3-sigma confidence level — which is short of the standard for a discovery.

Bertolucci repeated his view that the LHC will determine "by the end of 2012" whether or not the type of Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model exists. Workers are due to clear out of the LHC's underground tunnels next week, and after a cooldown period, the collider will once again start shooting proton beams into detectors at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.

Bertolucci said the LHC has grown "from an infant to a very, very healthy teenager" over the past year, and CERN's plans call for the beam energies to be ramped up from 3.5 trillion to 4 trillion electron volts this year.

The Higgs boson ranks as one of physics' most famous "known unknowns," Bertolucci said. "But we hope for unknown unknowns," he added. 2012 could be the year that the LHC points to new physics beyond the Standard Model, perhaps having to do with supersymmetry, mini-black holes or extra dimensions.

If the Higgs is found, that would confirm once again that the Standard Model provides the correct description of the subatomic world, and physicists would rejoice. But Bertolucci said "I would be more excited if we don't find it."

"If the Higgs mechanism is not there, another mechanism must be there," he explained. It turns out that particle physicists, like fans of detective novels, love a mystery.

Closing in on the W boson
While we're waiting for the next chapter in the Higgs quest, Fermilab's scientists are getting ready to unveil yet another piece of the subatomic particle puzzle. They'll announce the latest estimate of the mass of the W boson on Feb. 23, Roser said. That's significant, not only because it helps nail down another key value in the Standard Model, but also because an accurate measurement of the W boson can tell physicists more precisely where to look for evidence of the Higgs boson. Symmetry magazine illustrates the point with plush toys in a vise.

More on the frontiers of physics:

• Higgs vs. hype: A mini-guide
• Faster-than-light neutrinos pass test
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• What's a boson? Tour the particle zoo
• Special report on the Big Bang Machine
• Search msnbc.com for the Higgs boson
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

Alan Boyle is science editor at msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding the Cosmic Log Google+ page to your circles. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

AFP - Getty Images

The detectors of the OPERA experiment to measure neutrinos rise from the floor of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN's Gran Sasso Laboratory. Two human figures on the left and right edges of the picture provide a sense of scale.

Researchers say new tests have confirmed earlier indications that neutrinos can travel faster than light, but not everyone is convinced.

The claim runs so counter to a century's worth of physics that most observers won't be content until the findings from the OPERA experiment are repeated under a variety of conditions, by different teams of researchers. If the results hold up, that would require a reinterpretation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which effectively sets the velocity of light in a vacuum as a cosmic speed limit.

The latest round of tests was conducted to address some of the criticisms that cropped up in the wake of the OPERA team's initial announcement about faster-than-light neutrinos in September.

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication [for] physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, or INFN, said in a news release. "The experiment OPERA, thanks to a specially adapted CERN beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although the final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

"OPERA" is a tortured acronym that stands for "Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus." The team's researchers shoot beams of neutrinos from the CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border to INFN's Gran Sasso Laboratory, more than 450 miles (730 kilometers) away. The travel time for each pulse of neutrinos is measured to an accuracy of billionths of a second. In the faster-than-light experiment, the researchers reported that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than a light beam would have.

The revised experiment sent out 3-nanosecond-long bursts of neutrinos, spaced by as much as 524 nanoseconds, INFN said. "This permits to make a more accurate measure of their velocity, at the price of a much lower beam intensity; only 20 clean events have been collected by OPERA in this phase. Additional events could be eventually collected in the next year run," the institute said.

Jacques Martino, director of France's National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at CNRS, was quoted as saying that the search for potential experimental errors "is not over."

"There are more checks of systematics currently under discussion," he said. "One of them could be a synchronization of the time reference at CERN and Gran Sasso independently from GPS, using possibly a fiber [cable]."

Some physicists criticized the initial experiment because they thought it did not fully account for the relativistic effects of the Global Positioning System, which was used to track the elapsed time as well as the distance traveled between CERN and Gran Sasso.

INFN said the updated results have been submitted for review and publication in the Journal of High Energy Physics. But ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge reported that about 15 of the experiment's nearly 200 collaborators have declined to lend their names to the journal submission, on the grounds that further confirmation is required.

An unnamed source on the OPERA team told ScienceInsider that the controversy over the faster-than-light findings was exhausting. "Everyone should be convinced that the result is real, and they are not," the source was quoted as saying.

Other researchers, including physicists with the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, are working up independent analyses of neutrino runs to assess the OPERA team's findings. The initial outside assessments are expected to become available within six months or so, but end-to-end replications of the experiment could take significantly longer.

Update for 2 p.m. ET Nov. 18: In response to some of the comments below, I've changed the headline on this item, which originally read "Faster-than-light neutrinos confirmed." I realize the new headline still implies that superluminal neutrinos actually exist even though the evidence for that is in dispute, but I hope you'll understand that this is shorthand for "New experiment continues to support hypothesis about faster-than-light neutrino travel."

More on the faster-than-light controversy:

• Neutrinos spark wild scientific leaps
• Faster-than-light neutrinos? Not so fast, some say
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Commentators have been surprisingly fast to point to faster-than-light neutrinos as evidence that scientists could be wrong about lots of things, including the causes of climate change. But the most likely scenario is that special relativity — a theory that contends nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light in a vacuum — will turn out to be right. Or at least relatively right.

Two weeks after the neutrino experiments first came to light, the prevailing view among physicists is that the observations will somehow be shown to be wrong. The time measurements had to be made to an accuracy of billionths of a second. Synchronizing the time signatures over a distance of more than 450 miles of neutrino flight, from the CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border to Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory, is extremely challenging.

Nature News cites one paper questioning whether the clock synchronizations accounted for the varying gravitational force as the neutrinos sped through the planet. General relativity's gravitational time-dilation effect might have reduced the precision of the measurements, Imperial College London's Carlo Contaldi suggested. This wouldn't be the first time that special relativity and general relativity got tangled up with each other: The satellite-based GPS navigation system has to account not only for special relativity (which would make the satellite's clocks look as if they're moving slower from the perspective of earthly clocks) but also for general relativity (which would make them seem to move faster).

Other researchers have wondered whether fluctuations in the composition of the neutrino beam are just making it seem as if some of the particles are flying faster than light, when the effect is actually being caused by those unaccounted-for fluctuations. Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and a colleague at Boston University, Andrew Cohen, take another tack: They say the OPERA neutrino beam doesn't bear the energy signature that it should have if the particles were exceeding the speed of light.

The leaders of the OPERA collaboration, the team that made the neutrino observations, say they've accounted for the factors that have come to light so far, including the clock-synchronization issue. But Physics World reports that up to half of the collaboration's members think it's premature to submit their findings to a scientific journal for formal publication. (So far, the results have been posted only to the ArXiv.org preprint server.)

While the OPERA physicists continue to double-check and debate their results, researchers from the U.S.-based MINOS collaboration are gearing up to do an independent neutrino-timing check. Re-analyzing the existing MINOS data is expected to take up to six months, and if new experiments are required, that could take more than a year. In the meantime, physicists will continue trying to poke holes in the OPERA observations.

Neutrinos on the air
During this week's "Virtually Speaking Science" chat, Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll told me that OPERA's results are "almost certainly not true."

"Even the people who did the experiment will tell you that the chances are very, very small that it's right," Carroll said. "They just want people to understand that it's on the table, it's possible. They don't know what's wrong with their experiment. They would like someone else to check it, to duplicate it, to see what might be wrong."

If the observations turn out to be right, the implications would be "incredibly groundbreaking and earth-shattering," he said. But they wouldn't be beyond the power of theorists to explain, even within the framework of relativity.

"This is what we do," Carroll said. "We come up with new theories that fit crazy, unexpected pieces of data like this."

The OPERA experiment has already given rise to scores of papers on the ArXiv server, many aimed at explaining why the results aren't as crazy as they look. If the results hold up, theorists would have to adapt Albert Einstein's special relativity theory to accommodate faster-than-light observations. But Carroll says they wouldn't start from square one.

"We can say with confidence that there is some sense in which Einstein was right. He might not be the final word, but he wasn't absolutely wrong," he said. "Einstein's theories are not wrong, they've been tested right and left, and there's something right about them. They might need to be improved, they might need to be added to. ... But we're not throwing everything out and starting from scratch."

Some folks have suggested that faster-than-light neutrinos could open the way for backward time travel, reverse causality and other post-Einsteinian weirdness. In fact, folks are already collecting faster-than-light neutrino jokes. Two examples:

• "Neutrino. Knock-knock."
• "I wrote a speed-of-light joke ... but a neutrino beat me to it."

Carroll says that faster-than-light neutrinos would not necessarily disrupt causality and the arrow of time, and he explains why in a posting to his blog titled "Can Neutrinos Kill Their Own Grandfathers?"

"It could be true, but it doesn't have to be true. ... Theorists would have a lot of fun figuring out how the world actually works in that case," he said.

For an hourlong discussion of faster-than-light research as well as other weird frontiers of physics, including the Nobel-winning studies of our accelerating universe, listen to the full "Virtually Speaking Science" podcasts, either online or as an MP3 download. If you're a resident of the Second Life virtual world, you'll also enjoy Saturday's talk on dark energy, presented at 10 a.m. PT / SLT by the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics.

The climate connection
Particle physics and climate science rarely mix, but they did get mixed up this week in an opinion piece written for The Wall Street Journal by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The essay listed "five obvious truths about the climate-change issue," including this one as No. 5:

"The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might — repeat, might — travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere."

That argument earned almost instant derision from the science-minded Twitterverse, spawning #WSJscience as a new hashtag. The idea that one weird experimental claim proves that other, completely unrelated scientific claims are shaky came off as laughable. The classic construction for #WSJscience tweets goes like this: "If serious scientists can question relativity, there must be room to debate [whether Earth goes around sun]." (Hat tip to @cqchoi)

Rather than engaging in an extended rant myself, let me just link to a few of the rants elsewhere on the Web, plus a few totally serious articles about the frontiers of physics.

Selected commentaries on #WSJscience:

• LiveScience: What do neutrinos have to do with climate?
• Bad Astronomy: 'Head-asplodey' climate change denial
• Sci-ence: Comic strip about neutrino nuttiness
• Dot Earth: 'Settled science' and CO2
• Real Climate: Unsettled science

More faster-than-light speculation:

• Faster-than-light discovery raises prospect of time travel
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• Why the speed of light matters
• Nobel physics prize highlights puzzles