The leader of the research team that shocked the scientific world last year with findings that showed that neutrinos can travel faster than light quit his post this week.

In a strange set of circumstances, "additional" experiments were ordered from non scientific organizations. Somewhat expectedly, the 'new' experiments showed doubts on the original results reported by Prof. Antonio Ereditato and scientists working on the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA).

But this wasn't enough, external pressure was applied over the OPERA team that their funding would be cut which meant scientists would lose their research money and possibly jobs! As a result of this, according to the BBC,  members of the research team wanted Ereditato to resign.

For his part, the OPERA leader has not given a reason for his resignation.

The original OPERA experiment involved firing the subatomic particles for several years from the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland at detectors at the OPERA facility in Gran Sasso, Italy about 450 miles away. Last September, OPERA scientists published results that stated they had measured the neutrinos arriving at their destination 60 nanoseconds faster than the "Universe's speed limit," 186,282 miles per second, should allow.

Those results understandably sent the scientific world into a tizzy. The published findings directly challenged the notion, established more than a century earlier by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity that the speed at which light travels is the absolute upper speed limit in the physical universe.


"We wanted to find a mistake—trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects—and we didn't," Ereditato said at the time, according to the BBC. "When you don't find anything, then you say, 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this.'"

Earlier this month, after some pressure from outside, the results of a second attempt at the OPERA experiment were published that offered up a very different story. Scientists found that the neutrinos traveled at the speed of light but did not exceed it.

The speed of light was established as the cosmic speed limit, at least for ordinary matter in ordinary space, in 1905 by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (now known as special relativity), foreclosing the possibility of time travel into the past or of timely travel to other stars.