As most of you will know by now, last September scientists at Italy’s OPERA experiment reportedly clocked neutrinos traveling the 730 kilometers from CERN in Switzerland to Italy’s underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory about 60 nanoseconds faster than light.

But if this were true, a high percentage of the neutrinos would have shed lots of energy on the journey, says a new analysis by Boston University physicists. That would’ve released radiation, they allege: and the Italians didn’t notice any. Ergo, the faster-than-light finding is bollocks.

That doesn’t necessarily follow, you know. Italians notice stuff like breasts, cars, TV game shows baring breasts, articles about bunga-bunga parties, female bottoms, badly-made vongole sauce, and when an opera singer misses a note. They have no track record at all in spotting a lack of radiation from fast-moving neutrinos.

“I would be ecstatic to see some kind of new physics coming from this experiment,” says Andrew Cohen, a theoretical physicist ,“It’s just hard to accommodate that, given this radiation thing.”

Andrew has obviously never been to Italy, a country where things not being noticed is a way of life. When cigarette ads appear on posters, the authorities fail to notice them – which is odd, because advertising cigarettes in outdoor media is banned there. When one man sporting an outsize black trilby and a bulge in his inside pocket is the only person to turn up at the auction of an impounded Mafia smuggling boat, nobody notices.

Gilles Henri, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute of Planetary Science and Astrophysics in Grenoble, France, wonders whether fluctuations in the neutrino beam may be to blame. In a paper posted online on October 2, he suggested that some neutrinos in the crowd that travelled to Italy may have started their journey earlier than thought, distorting the average speed calculated for the group.

Now that’s more like it. Any self-respecting French neutrino would’ve given somebody a backhander in order to arrive first; and Italian neutrino watchers (as I think I’ve already established) simple can’t be trusted to notice false starts.

Anyway, a second neutrino experiment at Gran Sasso called ICARUS has been searching for signs of this radiation and found none, another group reported online on October 17. But it seems that nobody clocked the speed. That’s the Italians for you: no idea for detail. All flash and no substance.

As it happens, wacky outside-track theories do exist that allow for faster-than-light neutrinos maintaining their energy. But it seems to me we’re all looking in the wrong place re this one. What we need is a German team on the case.

Your German scientists, right, would have said “Nein, nein, nein, dass ist unmoglich”, and repeated the experiment immediately. If it produced the same result, they’d have called in a regiment of Brussels boffins, who would’ve kept on doing the experiment until they got the result they wanted. This is how settled science (and the EU) work.

The Greek reaction to being asked to do such an experiment would be “Why?”. The Italian reaction, having done it, was to go off half-cocked and worry about the ramifications later. Spanish scientists would’ve offered to do it tomorrow (that itself being a study in Time dilation), and Irish scientists might logically say, “Ah sure, we’ve given this some thought, and we think you should double the distance to give the slow-coaches a chance”. The Chinese would steal the results using cyber-blagging, and immediately conclude that the West was still miles behind.

As for we British, our plucky lads would most likely call the result “an imponderable”, and watch from a safe distance until the problem resolved itself. Or not.Very probably, Oliver Letwin would leave the results in a Bloomsbury litter bin. David Cameron would recommend the scientists pull their socks up because they were doing enormous harm to the UK economy. Harriet Harman would blame the failure on gender imbalance, and insist that some wimminos as well as neutrinos were involved. And Ed Miliband would demand a Plan B.

The bottom line, as they say at bunga-bunga parties, is that Einstein’s relativity theory asserting how nothing can travel faster than light almost certainly still stands; and never trust Italian data about anything where forward motion is concerned.  Maybe we should give the Italians another go, but this time with the neutrinos engaging reverse gear. Listen, it’s worth a try.