The James Webb Space Telescope could prove to be one if the most important missions that not just NASA but mankind has ever undertaken. The human race has looked up at the stars as long as we have existed and pondered our place in the universe. We now have the technology to answer some of the ultimate questions that those before us could not. Thanks to our technology we can now peer deeper into space, and time, than has ever been possible. We have the technology, but do we lack the will? In the 60s America was focused on the future, nothing was impossible. In every respect we knew then that our generation would be measured by it's ability to plan for the future and act on that plan. It seems that today we have lost that vision, that ability to dream of tomorrow. The recent near cancellation of JWST is just one example of that, another is the ending of the Space Shuttle program and the fact that it has no replacement. America can no longer send a man into space on her own.

Yes JWST is expensive, but so was the trip to America by Columbus. All cutting edge projects are. The cost of exploration has no guarantee of return. If we are not willing to explore, to expand our horizons what will become of us? As with Hubble we know that we will have an view of the universe we have never seen before. We know we will learn things and expand mankind's understanding of our place in the universe. Even the average person will benefit by this increase in our understanding. It has religious, political, and intellectual implications.

We are on the verge of a world that is inner focused, not thinking of tomorrow, of loosing the ability to dream, the capability to change the future, and to understand that serendipity will indeed bring progress. One cannot predict what we will learn but we know that we will learn. If we do not explore we only know one thing...we will NOT learn. We cannot allow this to happen. Each of us has to make a change. We are part of the problem, we are part of the solution. The choice is ours how will history remember us?

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers at CERN said measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done. "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing. We now want colleagues to check them independently."

"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research. "They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements," he said Thursday.

Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately. "It's a shock," said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. "It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that — if it's true." The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance.

There have been other claims in the past such as as claim in 2000 by scientists from the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J.In that experiment they manipulated a vapour of laser-irradiated atoms that boost the speed of light waves causing a pulse that shoots through the vapour about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum. To date none have been proven or duplicated.

In this claim CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.

Don't get to excited, it looks promising, we will see if it can be duplicated. Once that happens ... get excited.