So a scientist, a pseudoscientist, and a priest walk into CERN

"We want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy." -Dr. Antonio Ereditato, on experimental results at CERN showing neutrinos exceeding the speed of light.

So, it looks like they've gone and cocked up physics again. In short, a large body of data from a long series of CERN experiments is basically showing that some neutrinos, which are low-mass elementary particles that are blasting through your body right now at great speeds at pretty much all times, apparently slightly exceed the speed of light sometimes.

So that's a pretty big deal because the speed of light is the absolute speed limit of the universe. We have a century of physics backed up by a vast body of experimental verification telling us that the speed of light is the inviolable ceiling on velocity. If this result ends up being verified and turns out true, then science has a lot of backtracking to do to figure out where everything went wrong.

Let me begin with all the caveats one must deploy when it looks like physics has been really, truly, savagely cocked up in a single go. I know that the results are still undergoing verification, and to date there has been no independent replication of this experiment. Dr. Ereditato's team has done the good science thing, however, and put their results online for all to see, dissect, and contest before openly declaring that physics has been utterly changed forever. The word is still out, and this thing is not final or by any means conclusive, but it is interesting, and if it turns out to be Truth As We Know It, then it's one of the greatest innovations in physics since Jenga.

Discoveries of this sort are always interesting because they really show how sharp the contrast is between good thinking and bad thinking. Start with the following premise:

• New data shows that something really important we used to believe is either wrong or incomplete.

To my mind, there are three very general ways to react to news like this. The first way sounds like this:

• Now lets not be hasty, because this really screws with things. Lets get all of our biggest noggins to work on this thing together, verify our results, replicate the experiments, just generally rake our own data over the coals and see what comes out. And if what comes out as true is very much like the apparent result, then we've got to go back and fix some things, and it's super exciting when science is wrong because, when we learn that science has been wrong, we get to fix it.

This is the scientist's reaction: excitement about changing our body of knowledge tempered by prudence, with a side of willing submission to intense, professional scrutiny. Another way to react might be something like:

• New data? More like true data! Stop everything, no need for verification, we've already got the story.

This is the pseudoscientist talking. It's the reaction we heard when Deepak Chopra "proved" that soothing sounds make water look prettier, when they "discovered" that you only use 10% of your brain, and when one slanderous shill for Big Pseudoscience "discovered" that Atlanteans built the Great Pyramids. Such thinking can be fixed: they've got all the excitement but none of the prudence, and about half as much of a commitment to finding the truth instead of finding the next big thing. Just calm down, guys, when we really change physics, we want to be certain, because otherwise we end up looking like Deepak Chopra.

But it's the priest's reaction that really is beyond salvaging:

• These uppity empiricists want to muck with our traditions. Haven't they read the sacred texts? These truths are fixed and immutable. If your vast body of data conflicts with what we've always believed, then your vast body of data is flawed, and if we're in a part of the world where my church hasn't yet been politically domesticated, we'll set you on fire if you keep spreading this bigoted, offensive, anti-Christian message.

You don't really need a list of examples for this way of thinking. Evolution? Big Bang cosmology? Tectonic plates? Dinosaurs? Germ theory? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, the Bible says so, I believe it, that settles it.

When scientists find something new, they explore it. When pseudoscientists hear something new, they embellish it. When priests hear something new, they bury it.