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"We have broken the speed of light"
    #7301247 -

Interesting, but I thought this,or something very similar, had already been done. I'm not at all surprised by this and other than communication, I doubt there's much practical application for this. Not that that is some minor feat.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml


A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.
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Telegraph - Menswear/Shoes

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences.

For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.

The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.

Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."


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I keep it real because I think it is important that a highly esteemed individual such as myself keep it real lest they experience the dreaded spontaneous non-existance of no longer keeping it real. - Hagbard Celine

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: HagbardCeline]
    #7301288 -

I guess my understanding of relativity must be rusty because this sentence doesn't make sense to me; "For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving."
Moving at the speed of light doesn't mean "instant travel," it just means "really fuckin' fast," right? Light leaves stars on the other side of the galaxy all the time, and it still takes thousands of years to get here, so how would going 1 mph faster transform the travel from thousands of years to negative 1 week?

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: ApJunkie]
    #7301298 -

The reason they're saying that is because as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, if you were able to exceed it, according to relativity you would actually begin moving backward through time. So you could actually arrive before you left.

At least, that's my understanding.


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I keep it real because I think it is important that a highly esteemed individual such as myself keep it real lest they experience the dreaded spontaneous non-existance of no longer keeping it real. - Hagbard Celine

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: HagbardCeline]
    #7301307 -

Yeah, I'm aware of that "rule"... but time only slows down for the person moving at that speed, not his departure location or destination. If I leave here at the speed of light heading for pluto it would seem like a quick 5 minute journey to me, but it would take almost a month from your perspective here on earth.
Now say I was going faster than light. It can't seem to ME like I arrive before I depart because human brains wouldn't be able to cope with that shit, and my head would either explode, or it would feel like a nearly instant arrival. To everyone else however, it would just shorten the trip to 3 weeks. :shrug:

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: ApJunkie]
    #7301323 -

I'm sure someone who can explain will happen in here before long.


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I keep it real because I think it is important that a highly esteemed individual such as myself keep it real lest they experience the dreaded spontaneous non-existance of no longer keeping it real. - Hagbard Celine

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: ApJunkie]
    #7301490 -

Now say I was going faster than light. It can't seem to ME like I arrive before I depart because human brains wouldn't be able to cope with that shit

Yes, that's exactly what would happen, and that's why it's not possible. Your trip would appear to you to have taken -5 seconds. It's like saying that you have a piece of wood that is -5 centimeters long. It is meaningless.

Traveling faster than light results in equations that show the mass of an object being the square root of -1 grams.

For this reason, it is meaningless to speak of anything traveling faster than light.

Moving at the speed of light doesn't mean "instant travel," it just means "really fuckin' fast," right?

Intuitively, yes, but relativistic effects are not intuitive.

When something travels very nearly the speed of light, its time slows down with respect to the time of something not moving.

Imagine you and a friend both put on very accurate wristwatches and synchronize them perfectly, then you get on a train and your friend stands on the ground by the tracks.

As the train speeds up, you will notice that your friend's watch starts ticking faster than yours. Meanwhile, your friend will notice that your watch starts to slow down compared to his.

Each of you experience the passage of time as you ordinarily do: when your watch ticks off a minute, it will seem like a minute passed. Same for your friend. It's only in observing each other that you notice something's different.

If the train speeds up to nearly the speed of light (which you can never actually reach), the observed differences between your two wristwatches increases, though still, each of you feels time passing normally for yourself.

At speeds VERY close to the speed of light, your friend will observe your watch almost stopped, and you will observe your friend's watch spinning wildly fast.

Speed up even closer to the speed of light, and your friend will grow old and die right in front of you even though, to you, it's only been a minute since the train ride started.

If someone were to exceed the speed of light, their clock would run backward with respect to someone standing still. They would be getting ready to start their trip and another 'them' would call on the phone from the destination saying that he's already there. This paradox is one reason why it is believed with very high confidence that traveling at or faster than the speed of light is not possible.

By the way, this isn't a theoretical mind experiment. It has been confirmed experimentally and these principles are even used in things like GPS satellites that depend on very accurate timing. Einstein's relativistic equations are used in the GPS software to compensate for these effects. Without the knowledge given us by these equations, GPS would not work.

I believe that the 'breakthrough' reported in the above article will eventually be discredited as many such clams before this one have been. It's telling that it was published in a newspaper instead of a science journal, especially considering that anyone who actually does demonstrate superluminal communication will absolutely, completely, entirely turn the world of physics up-side-down and send every physicist on Earth back to school to learn physics all over again.

Such enormous news would be headlines in every science journal on the planet overnight.


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Republican Values:

1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you.
2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child.
3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer.

4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: Diploid]
    #7301823 -

So, if the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate, theoretically after a long long LONG time,
the stuff in the expanding universe itself should reach the speed of light.....
Right....?

Then if the expansion goes past the speed of light, and since we will be relatively part of the expansion, would time reverse as if in a cycle....?
Or, could it only be viewed this way if the other relative POV was at the 0,0,0....?

I don't know if my questions make sense the way I wrote them, but there ya~ go....    :tongue:


>^;;^<


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I'll be your midnight French Fry....  :naughty:

"The most important things in life that are often ignored, are the things that one cannot see...."
>^;;^<

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: PhanTomCat]
    #7301845 -

Kurt Vonnegut answers some of your questions in the book Timequake.


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Supercollider? I just met her!

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: PhanTomCat]
    #7301867 -

> theoretically after a long long LONG time,
the stuff in the expanding universe itself should reach the speed of light.....

Nope, it would only get real real real REAL close to the speed of light. If you keep dividing something over and over by two, you get a really small number, but you never end up with zero. Same idea.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: PhanTomCat]
    #7301869 -

The expansion of the universe isn't things moving apart into empty space, but rather space itself expanding into... nothingness. Because of this, all our metrics change as space changes and so the expansion of the universe is not bound by the speed of light.

The speed of light would apply if matter were expanding into empty space. The universe is expanding into empty nothingness.

At least that's the best answer given the currently available evidence.

We live in a weird place. :yesnod:


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Republican Values:

1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you.
2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child.
3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer.

4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: PhanTomCat]
    #7301877 -

Im pretty sure the theory is that space is expanding faster than light. This does not violate relativity because information still cannot be sent faster than light and causality isnt in trouble (effects cant come before causes).

edit- I cant find the number in my shittie old astro. book. The speed of the expansion is changing though, getting faster now (as you mentioned). In the past it was expanding slower. It goes through different periods and I dont think there is much consensus on what its end behavior will be.

Edited by Qubit (08/16/07 06:17 PM)

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: DieCommie]
    #7301940 -

Dang, you guys were ON IT....!    :smile:

It is a weird place indeed....
I am finding it difficult to fathom an expanding boundry on the outside of a vacuum - keeping nothing out of it....  :what:

:woodscream:


>^;;^<


--------------------
I'll be your midnight French Fry....  :naughty:

"The most important things in life that are often ignored, are the things that one cannot see...."
>^;;^<

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Re: "We have broken the speed of light" [Re: PhanTomCat]
    #7302788 -

nice thread wish i had something to contribute ;p


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The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days.

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Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again) [Re: HagbardCeline]
    #7304403 -

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070816-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.html

Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again)
August 16, 2007


A paper submitted to the physics arXiv has been picked up by a number of major news outlets (e.g., the Daily Mail)
because the paper suggests that its authors have measured something traveling faster than the speed of light. Unfor-
tunately, the claim is worse than weak; it is silly. I'll talk about why that is after briefly discussing their research.
The paper in question has no data at all so; although it asserts that it has measured superluminal velocities, it offers
nothing to back that up. It also has very little in the way of experimental detail, so we can't determine with certainty
what they are measuring, making it very difficult to evaluate their claims. We'll take as close a look as we can, given
these limitations.
The researchers make use of the property called total internal reflection (brief discussion). When light is above a cer-
tain angle of incidence on an interface between two materials--say, at the face of a prism--it can be totally reflected,
provided it is arriving at this interface from the higher refractive index material. However, near the boundary,
something called an evanescent wave forms that does not propagate like normal light (technically it does not propag-
ate at all) and quickly decays away to nothing. If you take a second prism and place it very close to the interface
where total internal reflection occurred, then some light from this evanescent wave will leak across the interface and
exit the second prism. The prisms have to be no further than the wavelength of light involved for this to work.
Now the interesting questions are: where did the energy in this light come from? How fast did it travel across the
boundary? The first question is interesting because the evanescent field has no energy in it. This is because the elec-
tric and magnetic fields that make up the field are phased in such a way that the product is always zero. The second
question is interesting because the speed of light is not defined in a way that is intuitive to non-physicists. Suffice it to
say that, for the evanescent wave, the speed of light is zero, and therefore any measurable speed is faster than the
speed of light.
So, how are these authors measuring an excessive speed of light? In practical terms, most experiments measure
light in terms of what is called the group velocity, which is how fast a pulse propagates along an underlying carrier fre-
quency. This can, in some circumstances, lead to the pulses traveling faster than the speed of light in the medium
they're in, but not faster than light in vacuum. Although the setup in the new paper is not entirely clear, they were
measuring the arrival time of pulses, which means we're talking about group velocity rather than the actual speed of
light.
Another problem that occurs in these experiments comes from determining when the pulse actually arrived. If you
analyze a pulse of light, you find that it is made up of a huge number of frequencies that, as you move away from the
fundamental frequency, get lower and lower in amplitude. Once you look at the experimental set up in detail, you find
that it is triggering on the pre-pulse noise generated by these high frequency components.
Separate from the whole speed of light issue, the answer to the energy question in this experimental setup is interest-
ing. Once the two prisms are close to each other, the evanescent wave is partially reflected from the second prism
back to the first prism. When this happens, the total electric field and total magnetic field are no longer such that their
product is always zero--there is energy in the field. Furthermore, if you analyze the components of the fields that con-
tain the energy, you find that they do have a non-zero speed of light and it is--you guessed it--the same c that applies
everywhere else in the universe.
So although this makes for an interesting physics lecture--or at least I thought it was interesting--it is not new physics
and not a breakdown of special relativity.


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No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical. ~ Niels Bohr

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Re: Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again) [Re: automan]
    #7304836 -

Amazing,I love stuff like this :grin:


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Re: Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again) [Re: Liquid_Dimension]
    #7306435 -

You know what i never got? How Time and Light are relative... How come "Travelling faster than light" makes you go back in time? It Doesn't at all...

Think about it, Ok, so you travelled faster than all the particles around you, but you're in a different location with different light particles, that once you stop moving, are going to start bouncing off you, and those particles that you were near earlier that would have touched you if you moved slower, now didn't, and instead touched the ground. So you're there, and instantly you vanish and are somewhere else, just faster than 186,000 mps.


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OP is now RP!  Read about it here!


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Re: Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again) [Re: Maverick]
    #7306613 -

DRTMaverick said:
How come "Travelling faster than light" makes you go back in time? It Doesn't at all...

Your right it doesn't. You cant go faster then the speed of light. So what good does it mean to say "If you could go faster then light then..." You can put anything after that statement, because the premise is false.

Time and light are relative...hmm, well I would think of it as time is relative and light speed is absolute.

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Re: Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again) [Re: DieCommie]
    #7306735 -

> You know what i never got? How Time and Light are relative...

It is a pretty easy thought experiment...

Imagine you are on a train, going down the track with a constant speed, and you toss a ball up into the air and catch it. What path does the ball take? It goes straight up, say 3 feet, then straight back down for a total distance of 6 feet.

Now imagine you are outside the train watching this happen from the train station as the train passes by. As the train approaches the station you see the ball start to go up. As the train is directly in front of you, the ball is at it's maximum height of 3 feet. As the continues on, the ball comes back down and is caught. If you plot the path the ball took you would notice that the path is triangular rather than straight up and down.

If you do the math, you will find that the ball actually had a longer path to travel (up one half of the triangle, down the other half) when you watch from the station rather than (straight up and down) when you watch from the train. The math is very simple geometry. The repercussions are not so simple. Observations in timespace are completely dependent upon your (the observer's) relative velocity to the object being observed.

> How come "Travelling faster than light" makes you go back in time? It Doesn't at all...

It doesn't. If you could travel faster than light you would break causality (effects would happen before you caused them). Mathematically, in order to go faster than the speed of light you end up having to take the square root of a negative number, which is invalid.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again) [Re: Seuss]
    #7308215 -

I understand that, but why can't people think of things as Faster than the speed of light? Like we used to think you couldn't go faster than the speed of sound until we proved that wrong. What if we were 400 years ago, would you still believe it impossible to travel the speed of your voice?


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OP is now RP!  Read about it here!


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Re: Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again) [Re: Maverick]
    #7308230 -

DRTMaverick said:
I understand that, but why can't people think of things as Faster than the speed of light?

Your right, thats where the insanity comes in. It is one of the 'postulates' of special relativity. It says that the speed of light is constant no matter how fast you are traveling. In other words, one person moving on earth and one standing still measures the same photon to be the same speed. This does not happen with regular objects.

If you go with this idea, everything else can be derived as seuss showed.

Why does light behave in this way? No body knows, we just observe that it does. Nobody really knows 'why' anything in science. Why mass? Why time? Why relativity?

edit - Also, the speed of light and the speed of sound are different phenomena, so even though they both have a 'barrier' there is no real connection between them (apples to oranges).

Edited by Qubit (08/18/07 05:20 PM)

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