Faster than light? Why not?

Reports that scientists at CERN have found neutrinos to travel faster than light do not necessarily mean that special relativity is wrong.

First, the difference to the speed of light is apparently very small, so this could easily be the result of errors in setting up the experiment, measuring relevant variables, synchronizing clocks... The author of the report on the experiment has said himself that "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result".

Second, there are already a number of known "faster-than-light" phenomena which are not deemed to contradict relativity, and this may turn out to be just another one of those.

Third, I note that the reported result of the neutrino speed experiment chimes rather well with two of my findings relating to special relativity developed in this blog so far:

1) Faster-than-light signals would not involve any reversal of cause and effect and would not enable time travel into the past, according to a proper understanding of special relativity which avoids the trap of the "simultaneity syndrome" in modern physics.

2) The acceleration of macroscopic objects may be constrained by the fact that they contain electrically charged particles, which cannot be accelerated beyond the speed of light because light itself can be regarded as outwardly propagating disturbances in the electric fields of charged particles, as mentioned in this post.

For example, let there be an electron surrounded by or made up of a spherically symmetrical electric field, which can be visualized as a series of concentric spheres around the electron. If the electron is briefly accelerated, the distance between neighbouring spheres is reduced in the direction of acceleration and increased in the opposite direction as the information about the acceleration travels outwards. The disturbance of the electric field - an electromagnetic signal - is located at the boundary between the spheres that have been accelerated and those that haven't.

The law of light propagation could quite simply be that electromagnetic radiation emanating from an accelerated electron always traverses the same number of spheres as defined above in the same period of time as measured by Einstein-adjusted clocks in the system of the electron prior to acceleration.

According to this model, accelerating objects that contain electric charges also produce outwardly propagating field disturbances and are surrounded by "spheres" that move ever closer to each other in the direction of acceleration. The inability to accelerate charged particles up to or beyond the speed of light could then be a consequence of the fact that those spheres cannot be compressed to infinite density or beyond.

Particles that do not carry any electric charge, on the other hand, would not be constrained in the same way, though there may be other constraints regarding their acceleration.

The sphere model is a line of thought I intend to develop later, once I've reached the appropriate point in my understanding of special relativity as developed in this blog.