Once upon a time, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip.

Thanks to the Internet, the whole physics world was watching on Friday when Dario Autiero, of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon in France, in front of a palpably skeptical roomful of physicists, put a whole new category of speed demons on the table, namely the shadowy subatomic particles known as neutrinos.