I love articles like this: Scientists break the speed of light. Apparently, a couple of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light, which is 186,282.397 miles per second (that’s 670,616,628 MPH for you lay people out there, and 1,079,252,848.8 km/h for my metric friends). Actually I love any new article or report that claims to have impossibly broken some law of the physical universe. (I have been following the Steorn Orbo experiment from the beginning.)

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons – energetic packets of light – traveled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart. I’m sure such a claim has the scientific community scratching their heads thinking about the physical and theoretical ramifications for the very structure of the known universe. But I can’t help but wonder how on earth you measure that type of speed. Never mind that being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences, such as an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving. I wanna’ get my hands on that stopwatch.

Seriously though, does anyone else out there keep track of stories like this? What difference does it make whether or not new discoveries claim to break known laws? I mean, until now the only one who could travel fast enough to turn back time was Superman. Are we living in a day when comic book fiction becomes scientific fact?