Question: I was told recently that at one point during the evolution of the universe, space was expanding faster than the speed of light. If this is true, what makes the CERN neutrino experiment so significant?

Peter Williams answered on 18 Nov 2011:

this is called “cosmological inflation” and was proposed by Alan Guth in the 1980’s. it solves a number of problems in cosmology, such as why it looks the same in every direction and why is it so close to being “flat”.
but importantly, it proposes that space is expanding faster than light speed, not the particles themselves, think of it as the distances between things increasing without any motion of the things themselves.
also, the inflationary period of the universe came to an end and we’re not in it now.
so superluminal neutrinos would be a really big deal.