Matt Milless

Physics professor Chad Orzel and his dog Emmy go in search of the bacon boson and other scientific mysteries — a quest documented in Orzel's latest book, "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog."

Teaching relativity to a dog may sound like a hopeless mental exercise, but physics professor Chad Orzel says it actually makes the job of teaching relativity to humans easier.

"It makes the whole thing seem much more approachable," Orzel explains. "If you think like a dog, dogs have fewer preconceptions about how things work."

And Orzel's dog, a German shepherd mix named Emmy, won't let him get away with hand-waving gobbledygook. "A lot of the things that she interjects with, those are points where people reading along would say, 'Wait a minute! That doesn't make sense!'" he said.

Of course, Orzel isn't really teaching relativity to his dog. Rather, Emmy serves as the straight man — er, dog — for a scientific dialogue that makes the equations go down more easily. Such dialogues are standard rhetorical devices that go back to Democritus, Socrates, Plato and all those cats in ancient Greece. It's a technique that Orzel used to crowd-pleasing effect in his 2009 book about quantum mechanics, "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" — and now Emmy is back for more in the newly published sequel, "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog."

"If you've already talked about quantum physics, relativity is the obvious way to go," Orzel told me. "It's the other great theory of modern physics."

Orzel, who teaches physics at Union College in New York, said that Albert Einstein's special and general theories of relativity can actually be boiled down to one sentence. "All of the weird stuff you hear about E=mc2, clocks running slow when they move, time moving at different rates near a black hole ... all of that weird stuff is just a consequence of the fact that the laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving," he said.

Basic Books

"How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog" isn't just for dog lovers ... or relativity lovers, for that matter.

And if there's one thing dogs know a lot about, it's moving. So Orzel casts his explanations of the weird stuff in terms a dog just might be able to understand: For example, when he refers to the speed of light in a vacuum as remaining constant, no matter how it's measured in a moving frame of reference, he doesn't use the standard example of moving rocket ships. Instead, Orzel talks to Emmy about bunnies, cats and dogs in motion.

At times, Emmy tries to jump into the driver's seat with her inquiries into the Unified Theory of Critters, or her plans to build the Superconducting Kibble Collider and search for the bacon boson. ("It's responsible for making other kinds of particles yummy," she explains in the book.) Then it's Orzel's job to tug on the leash and get Emmy's head back in the game. And after a chuckle or two, we're ready to press on as well.

"Because of the dog, I'm able to get away putting some stuff in there that I otherwise wouldn't be able to," Orzel told me. "You can put in some heavy stuff and lighten the tone quite a bit."

That's not to say Orzel has turned relativity into a romp in the park. The book still poses quite a few mental agility trials — particularly when it comes to the counterintuitive aspects of relativistic phenomena, such as the famous "twin paradox." But as much as possible, Orzel highlights the concrete, real-world examples of relativity at work, such as the fact that a height difference of just 12 inches has an ever-so-slight impact on timekeeping, due to the relativistic effects of our planet's gravitational field. The same effects have to be accounted for in GPS satellite navigation systems.

"That shows that this isn't purely some incredibly exotic thing," Orzel said. "It's something that happens in everyday situations. It's just that the effects are usually too small to measure."

So now that Chad Orzel and his dog Emmy have run circles around the two great pillars of modern physics — quantum mechanics and relativity theory — what's next?

"We'll have to see what the dog wants to talk about," Orzel joked. "A few people have asked about statistical physics, but I'm thinking I don't know if even the dog wants to do that."

More about Einstein and relativity:

• Right again, Einstein: New test nixes faster-than-light findings
• E=mc2 and other Einstein manuscripts are going online
• Interactive: Why relativity is right, and still relevant
• Special report: A Century of Einstein

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

CERN

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.

Months after researchers reported that they measured neutrinos traveling faster than light, they're finding that the incredible result may have been due to a bad connection rather than a violation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The potential instrumental glitches, first reported by ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge, is addressed in a statement from the OPERA Collaboration, the group behind the controversial neutrino-beam experiments.

Last year, the OPERA team made ultra-precise measurements of how long it took for neutrinos to make the 450-mile (732-kilometer) trip between the CERN particle physics lab on the French-Swiss border and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. When they took the speed of light and a wide variety of other experimental factors into consideration, they determined that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before they should have.

If the results were to stand up, they'd mark the first failed test for Einstein's century-old theory. That's one reason why researchers found them so hard to believe, even though a repetition of the experiment yielded the same results. The OPERA team has been reviewing the entire experiment, and several other research groups have been trying to replicate it. A key concern has been the Global Positioning Satellite system used to clock the neutrinos' transit time. The measurements are required to be so precise that the relativistic effects of Earth's gravitational field on the GPS system had to be taken into account.

Now sources familiar with the OPERA review say scientists have identified two potential problems with the experimental apparatus. One has to do with a fiber-optic connector that sends a GPS time stamp to the experiment's master clock. That connector may not have been functioning correctly when the neutrino-timing measurements were made, and as a result, the recorded flight time would be shorter than the actual time. That alone could explain the seemingly faster-than-light results.

Another potential problem has to do with the oscillator that was used to generate the time stamps for GPS synchronization. This problem could have made the flight time look longer than it really was.

The sources I contacted via email declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak in advance of the statement issued Thursday. One of the scientists said the glitches should not be characterized as "errors," but instead as "nasty instrumental effects."

CERN spokesman James Gillies confirmed that the GPS connector problem was being investigated, but he emphasized that the effects still had to be confirmed. "More beam will be needed before we know for sure," he told me in an email. Tests with short pulsed beams have been scheduled for May.

Update for 9 a.m. ET Feb. 23: CERN has issued the expected statement about the potential glitches:

"The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May."

Update for 1:53 p.m. ET Feb. 23: Here's a similar statement from Italy's nuclear research institute, INFN:

"The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the event's time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.

 "These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies."

More about those pesky neutrinos:

• Faster-than-light neutrinos pass test
• 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.