If I calculated correctly, that's only about .0025% faster than c. Practical implications?
Print out 90% of physics articles from the century. Get big trash can. Put printout in trash can.
Of course i'm exaggerating, but if the story is true, this is going to be big.
Speed of light is the main block for things like time travel and a hard limit on communication speed.
It doesn't matter that it is only 0.0025%, what matters is that it can be done(if it is confirmed). As a(very poor) analogy, the first CPUs were probably about 0.0025% the speed of the modern ones, yet look where we are today, in no small part thanks to them. The point is, if true, this may well open a whole new realm in physics, and who knows what we will find there.
what i am most excited for is the possibility to travel faster than the speed of light. conventional theory dictated that the more mass you have the more fuel you would need to break the lightspeed barrier, however the closer you approach the speed of light the more fuel you would need therefore increasing your mass infinitely putting you in a perpetual null loop. but if that equation changes and we know that there are particles that travel faster than light speed limit we may have to re-examine this theorem. Especially with new power sources being discovered on the atomic and quantum levels. The splitting of those bonds if harnessed yield promising potential. Not to mention the existence of antimatter which releases catastrophic amounts of energy when in contact with matter. We can't seem to find any right now so were limited with how much we can make which is a miniscule amount. Limits the production seem to be on a physics level as opposed to a technological one. But who knows if the speed of light is up for discussion almost anything can be in a table.
All this reminds me of the beginning of Mostly Harmless: "One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there."
I doubt the experiment will be repeated, but it sure would be awesome if it broke Einstein.
Using ion propulsion and gravitationally assisted slingshot trajectories, you'd get to Proxima Centauri about 173 days 12 hours sooner, which sounds pretty cool if you ignore that that's 173 days of a 19,000 year trip.
By nuclear pulse propulsion (EDIT: invented, but still theoretical, thanks adrianN) taking 85 years, you'd get there about 18 hours sooner.
More likely, it's experimental error.
.0025% is meaningless compared to the scale of the earth, but over hundreds of light years it's huge.
If we can send information even a little to the past, we can then send it a little more to the past, and by induction we can send information anywhere in time.
So we have infinite power computers. Singularity starts here.
edit: OK, this blows my mind (from https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tachyon#Speed):
It has been argued that we can avoid the notion of tachyons traveling into the past using the Feinberg reinterpretation principle which states that a negative-energy tachyon sent back in time in an attempt to challenge forward temporal causality can always be reinterpreted as a positive-energy tachyon traveling forward in time. This is because observers cannot distinguish between the emission and absorption of tachyons. For a tachyon, there is no distinction between the processes of emission and absorption, because there always exists a sub-light speed reference frame shift that alters the temporal direction of the tachyon's world-line, which is not true for bradyons or luxons. The attempt to detect a tachyon from the future (and challenge forward causality) can actually create the same tachyon and sends it forward in time (which is itself a causal event).
(http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/17/Harry_Potter_and_the_...)