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Scientists Speed up Light
An anonymous reader writes "With off-the-shelf components, scientists have managed to speed up light beyond the 'universal' constant of c, or roughly 300 million meters/sec. This, and the previous ability to slow light down could shake up the telecom world, according to the story at Science Blog." Also, all those posters with 186,000 miles per second as a speed limit need to be amended. At least entropy is still around!
Everyone say it together with me: "Phase velocity vs Group velocity" There are no photons in this experiment that are traveling faster than the speed of light. Only collections of them that 'appear' to be doing so. Think of this as an example: I space people out in a line, each of them two light minutes apart from the people next in line (all at rest with respect to each other). Now I go about talking to them and informing them of my plan. At 12:00 the first person waves, at 12:01 the second person waves, at 12:02 the third person waves, and so forth. My "wave" is propogating, therefore, at twice the speed of light. This is the same thing that this experiment is doing more or less. By spending extra time setting up the experiment, you can make it appear that a light pulse travels faster than c, but like my "wave" it is only an appearance.
...after all.
but can they achieve warp speed yet?
visit me at www.longdead.net
Hasn't this already been done before?
Were they able to speed it up to ridiculous speed, or perhaps even plaid?
...that even show up under Firefox. Thanks, "Science Blog!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seems like some fundamental principles of time-space are being violated.
Perhaps there is something wrong the the measuring instruments?
While they're at it, perhaps they could tell us the speed of gravity.
... it's "only" the phase velocity. This has been done before, and, since information is carried at the group velocity, there aren't any serious "light-cone" repercussions for Einsteinian limits on causality.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
IINAP but I think that althogh the scientists speeded up light in this particular medium that does not mean that the absolute limit will be change. Comments?
"And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn't move over - relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected."
So no, this isn't the massive, century-defining, warp-drive-enabling experiment you all are dreaming for. Sorry. It's neat, and it'll probably have cool applications though. And that should be enough.
There's more than one measure of the speed of light - the phase velocity and the group velocity. It's the group velocity that can't travel faster than c, the phase velocity is free to travel faster assuming dispersion is allowed. In any event, information travels at the speed of the group velocity, which is why the write-up mentions that Einstein ain't wrong just yet ("only a portion of the signal is affected").
If you look at this treatment of wave velocity, it's reasonably clear ([grin] - at least if you've done undergrad physics, but then in that case you'd know all about it anyway
A good quote from the above link:
The phenomena is also discussed in Feynman's Lectures on Physics ( vol 1, Chapter 48-6) in a bit more rigor - these books ought to be required reading of any physics undergrads
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
When people have 'c' recorded, it's assumed that it's referring light in a vacuum and it's not messed around with. So the values can stay the same.
Please note that this result doesn't violate the second postulate of special relativity, because the "speed of light" > c being talked about here is only the phase velocity in a medium. One cannot use these optics tricks to transmit material or information faster than c.
a coffee-can exhaust and a NOSx kit
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Cool. Now I'll be able to have conversations with people before words even come out of their mouth. Always wanted to do that ...
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
Does this story count as an obligatory Futurama reference?
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
Is this really that new? This has happened before. Read here: CNN: Light can break its own speed limit
And before we all start yapping, I quote from the (CNN) article:
This effect cannot be used to send information back in time," said Lijun Wang, a researcher with the private NEC Institute. "However, our experiment does show that the generally held misconception that `nothing can travel faster than the speed of light' is wrong.
Funny title. It's like saying sound travels faster in water than speed of sound in water. (It's 1440m/s BTW)
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn't move over - relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected.
Vague, but like others before have conjectured, probably a change in phase velocity.
Homer: In this house, we obey the laws of [physics].
Holy shit -- a subscriber to Slashdot with a terribly unsuccessful attempt at a first post.
Dude, why are you wasting your money?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Note that no information is being transmitted faster than the speed of light in such a case. Shadow may traverse across the spotlight faster than the speed of light, but the actual information that creates the shadow is still transmitted at the epeed of light from the spotlight to the wall.
give me a few miliseconds of credit
I have read this article everywhere I turn, on every news show I've watched today. Most of them are *NOT* portraying the "discovery" in its proper context.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
Is this really making the light waves go faster, or is it just anomalous dispersion? I heard in one of my Physics lectures that you can make something happen that looks like superluminal motion, and it caused a bit of controversy when someone did it, but it's not actually the wave that's moving faster than c - it's actually the wave envelope, which is related to the amplitude of the wave. I could try and explain, but I'd only make things confusing (if I haven't already!), so I have found some animations you can look at, see here and here.
On the other hand, if the light really is going faster than c, then I am thoroughly impressed!
maybe if he had faster dial-up then that would have actually been a first post.
They've increased the speed of light in optical fiber... Not a vacuum... (which is c).
In optical fiber, it's less than c. The posting makes too many fanciful assumptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
This isn't supposed to happen until 2208
e nces/timeline2.dhtml
http://www.gotfuturama.com/Information/ListsRefer
Meh, i seem to recall that Dark was already faster than light.
No, don't look confused - it was a bad joke to begin with. The film I'm reffering to is 'Neverending Story II', not star wars. Sorry. >_
And when can I get this speed for my car?
Microsoft is like...no, it's much worse.
What kind of horse shit is this?! We all know that they don't increase the speed of light until 2208.
Everyone say it together with me: "Phase velocity vs Group velocity"
No.
Prof.: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That's impossible! You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Prof.: Of course not! That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208!
Cubert: Also impossible!
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
That's like saying STFU when they open their mouths!
Gravity Sucks
...I was hoping someone had finally done a quantum vacuum experiment speeding up the local speed of light within the experiment area. But nooooo...
It'll happen though. Eventually. Probably not untill Maxwell's original equations are restored and made sense of versus Heavyside's edits, but it'll happen.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Doesn't that mean that they slowed it down by 900million m/s?
So they made light go backwards?
Could some one explain this to me? I never quite understood it.
.75c to my left, and one ball at a speed of .75c to my right. Then from the perspective of one ball, the other ball is traveling 1.5c, right? I know it's not, but why not?
Suppose I throw one ball at a speed of
At last! The creation of the warp core! Jump to original light speed, Mr. Scotty!
Farnsworth: "And these are the dark matter engines. They allow my ship to travel between galaxies in mere hours." Cubert: "But that's impossible! You can't travel faster than the speed of light!" Farnsworth: "Of course you can't! That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208!"
Actually, I believe that under some circumstances the second law of thermodynamics "breaksdown". http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2572
"What the...? Ah, fuck! I just saw my own ass in this funky scope. Gym time for me."
Table-ized A.I.
Isn't the speed of sound different in different water pressures?
When I am traveling at the speed of light, I WILL be able to see where I'm going....
Rick B.
I'll believe that information can be sent faster than the speed of light when I get the tipoff from myself in the future.
Check discover magazine, circa 1999 I think.
Good news travels at the speed of sound. Bad news at the speed of light. Rumor even faster.
--
make install -not war
Now our food is ready before we cook it!
mmm, some would disagreey .pdf
http://www.cheniere.org/techpapers/GiantNegentrop
Before the flack comes. Yes, as we currently define "energy", there is no way to reverse entropy. It's all based on assumptions, and they may not always be correct.
Check it out, see what you think.
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
"The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) considers it so important that it has been funnelling millions of dollars into projects such as "Applications of Slow Light in Optical Fibers" and research on all-optical routers."
(However, including the nuclear forces is moot since they have no influence nor can they be observed outside the nucleus of an atom.)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Given a signal source, a slotted waveguide and a detector, I can make it look like my signal travels faster than the speed of light. It really isn't though.
The problem lies in the assumptions that you make while doing the measurement. In the case of the waveguide experiment, you assume that the waves travel straight down the waveguide. You measure the wavelength and knowing the frequency, you calculate that the signal is going faster than the speed of light.
The assumption about the direction the waves is travelling is wrong though. As the frequency goes up, the waves tend to travel at an angle. What you measure therefore isn't the real wavelength, it's the distance between peaks along a non-perpendicular line.
I think these guys have fallen into the same trap.
The Light Speeds Up the Scientits.
2 + 2 = 5
For large values of 2.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Especially since a fiber optic pipe IS a waveguide for electromagnetic waves at the frequency of light.
Slack-Jawed Idiot Troll
I used to think there is a village in Texas missing their idiot.
It is now apparent there are two.
-- Mean People Suck
As was evidenced by the new FTL(faster than light) optical data processing center at the core of Slashdot, This article was accidentally Posted INTO the PAST!!!!
/my head asplodes.
Thus, making the first post read a DUPE, and not this one. This is the original!
iceberg
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Didn't Tesla already speed up light past c?
Actually, dial-up could be a lot faster than it is - but the FCC has set a limit of 53 kbytes /s. For one thing, they don't want the signal bleeding over into neighboring lines in the same cable (no one wants to hear a teletype machine in the background of their conversations).
For another thing, most of the phone wires are only 24 gauge. This is physically fine for voice communications, but it doesn't have a large enough diameter to even carry music, much less digital signals.
If only we could get them to switch over to about 18 gauge, we might not need DSL.
Michael
In other news, these scientists appear to have some sort of contract with ASUS...
Since your such a tough guy. Come on over and tell me what you think to my face. You fucking coward. Mr tough guy righty :). Bahahahaha. You red-neck drunken pussy! You couldn't beat up your little sister.
-- Mean People Suck
The significant part of the story is not in fact the alleged speeding up of light, but the slowing down of it. The story says it gest slowed down by up to a factor of 3.6, which will make processing it easier, and will speed up telecommunications (somehow).
I understand that life's not fair, just why is it never unfair in my favor?
Now who on earth could he be referring to ? :P
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
The wave front velocity of light is c. Period. Yes, you can come up with all kinds of setups to change phase or group velocity. No, you can't use them to transmit information superluminally. Case closed.
Hey, all you hill billy, trailer trash.
Shouldn't you guys be out impregnating your attractive cousins and further degrading the gene pool?
Let me tell you jerk-offs something:
Living in Kentucky, I've met a lot of you redneck types and you're just about all the same. You run off at the mouth a lot but when it comes to action you'd rather grunt like apes, puff up your chest, and run off like scared bitches.
Not all "lefties" "liberals", et. al. are passivists. In fact, some of use with more liberal view points like whipping the shit out of redneck douche-bags, even though most rednecks don't know how to fight(at least in any way that allows them to win).
So, go crawl back under the trailer cletus, nothing more to see here.
PS - How can you honestly still claim support for a President that continues to send our men to die in a desert for nothing. I have friends in Iraq and I'd like to see them come back rather than stay pointlessly risking death.
-EmpX
Wow... that sounds like an awesome movie title. I'd by tickets for that shit in a heartbeat!
Mixing politics with science; always a good idea (especially if you really really hate George Bush enough, which makes anything acceptable).
But seriously, if "nukular" was an acceptable pronounciation by Jimmy Carter -- who was one of the first nuclear engineers in the Navy (Academy class of 1946) -- and tens of millions of other Americans -- including Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton -- why single out George Bush?
See
http://volokh.com/2002_09_15_volokh_archive.html#8 5468441
http://volokh.com/2002_09_15_volokh_archive.html#8 5473616
http://volokh.com/2002_09_15_volokh_archive.html#8 5473709
http://volokh.com/2002_09_15_volokh_archive.html#8 5473746
[Eugene Volokh, 9:53 AM] September 19, 2002
WHAT'S WRONG WITH "NUCULAR"? Today's Slate Explainer reminded me of this question, which I've thought about a bit in the past.
One common answer is that saying "nucular" is wrong because "nuclear" is spelled, well, "nuclear," and not "nucular." But the standard rebuttal (mentioned in the Slate piece) is: How do you pronounce "iron"? I actually remember pronouncing it "iron" as a kid (as in "irony" without the "y"), and being told that this is not the usual pronunciation -- "iern" is probably the best way of representing how you're really supposed to pronounce it. If this phenomenon (called "metathesis") is OK in "iern," why isn't it OK in "nucular"?
But this is just the tip of the objection -- the broader objection is that this is English we're talking about here. English, the language of "women," of "colonel," of "laughter" and "slaughter," of "get" and "gem." As reader Brian Dulisse points out, "forte" can be pronounced "fortay," "fort," or "fortee." "This pronunciation is wrong because it doesn't match the spelling" isn't much of an argument in English.
It seems to me that the only sensible answer to "What is wrong with 'nucular'?" is "This is not the standard way that high-class people say it," coupled with "This term is a shibboleth that high-class people, and those influenced by them, use to sort those they'll call 'high-class' from those they'll call 'low-class.'" That's all the "wrong" there is here. Yes, I know this sounds like a leftist cultural critic position; but sometimes, as here, the leftist cultural critics are right. One day, "nucular" might be treated the same as "ah" for "I" or "crick" for "creek" -- a regional accent that's not wrong, but just different. It might even become the "correct" pronunciation, with "nuclear" sounding archaic or affected. It won't flow from a change to logic or morality, only a change of attitude by enough people in the influential classes, or by a change of who counts as the influential class.
So what of it? Well, if you're teaching a child (or an adult) to speak, of course you should teach him to say "nuclear," simply as an instrumental matter -- sounding high-class is usually (not always, but usually) more profitable, especially where the shibboleths are concerned. If you're making a purely esthetic judgment, well of course you're free to say "'Nucular' sounds ugly to me," just like you can say "Picasso looks ugly to me" or "Broccoli tastes bad to me." And if you're tr
The word is "propagate".
Actually it's 56 kbit/sec, not byte/sec and that's the theoretical limit you get when you put the available bandwidth through the Nyquist formula (i.e. if we ignore noise). I forgot the exact frequencies (200-3400Hz?) but the limits are imposed because of multiplexing on the long-distance lines. The local lines (the lines from the distribution system to the end users) can actually carry a much larger bandwidth, which is how DSL works. I don't see why we should try to make phonelines broadband capable when DSL is sufficient.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The speed of dial-up is not determined by the 'last mile' copper. It is determined by the fact that all phone lines are digitized once they hit the co. The sampling rate is 8 kB/s. That sets a maximum possible bit rate at 64 kB/s. To go faster you need compression.
BTW, what do you think the gauge of the wire in 100 MB/s ethernet cable is. Hint, it's not 18 gauge.
According to Futurama, this wasn't supposed to happen until 2208!
He's the predisent and president's don't lie, therefore Bush told us the truth and we need to support him and fight against those who hate us for our freedom.
Since your such a tough guy. Come on over and tell me what you think to my face. You fucking coward. Mr tough guy righty
But I'm sure you could beat her up; since you're full of enough hate toward red-necks.
She ain't gonna doo it, we'll tear the ship apart!!!
What with this workaday world, I'm too busy to read the articles anymore. So I'll just make up the story in my head. Scientists sped up light. Experiments -- launched a flashlight from a rocket, spun fiber optic lines really fast around their heads?
This article must be going faster than light and traveling backwards because JUST NOW I'm remembering seeing it like 2 days ago.
Wow... This is actually an informative thread, because it demonstrates how politics can cause any scientific discussion to degrade into name calling. I think that we can all discuss science without attacks on people.
Living in Ohio, "THE" battleground state, I have seen many casual arguments between two people who for all intents and purposes should be friends, degrade into fistfights.
Discussing points and their merits is great, and we are all capable of that without attacks on people's regions and pronounciations.
Why discuss who can beat up whom on a discussion board? The same way that hot 18 year old girl in a chat room can be a 90 year old fat man, the geek on this board could be a 6'4" former MP who has been to war. My guess is, if we all got into a bar together, we would have fun and get along....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
I'm not sure if anyone already posted the actual paper. ScienceBlog only links to itself and references a future printed publication. Well, here it is:
X -13-1-82
http://www.opticsexpress.org/abstract.cfm?URI=OPE
Lick it. Lick it real good. Your "hero" has single-handedly caused the collapse of the U.S. economy and caught us up in a war of no end. Yay for your team! You guys really know how to do it good.
Btw, enjoy our cheap oil prices while they last. George has really screwed the pooch on this one. Except he benefits personally from the monetary flow out of the people's pockets and into the ultra-super rich wealthy elites. Yes, those ones who you pretend to be a member of but are shitting on you all the way to the bank. You have no conecption of how you are being used or what elitist truly means.
This story is actually a dup. But because it's going faster than the speed of light, it got posted before the first instance :)
Now, create 'extreme conditions', where the first domino block is down, the last one is still standing, and halfway down the row, blocks are falling, but not quite down on the floor. Then, observe the 'wave front' of falling domino blocks. It will appear to move faster than the previously determined 'c'. How come?
Look more closely: as each block falls down, there's a fixed delay before it hits the next block. But what happens under our 'extreme conditions'? At the exact time a previous block would have hit the next one (under normal circumstances), that next block is already falling down! The time it takes for the 1000 blocks to fall down, is less than what normally would be expected.
Did this 'c' constant get violated? Nope, it still took the same amount of time for each block to fall down. Was the maximum 'c' speed exceeded? Nope. After tipping the first block, it still took the same amount of time before this 'information' was passed on to the next block. With a set of 1000 blocks all standing, the time needed for an initial 'disturbance' to be passed on to the last block, is still limited by 'c'.
So these 'extreme conditions' are like pre-tipping each block, and let you observe something that appeared to move faster than 'c'.
Nice for the lab folks, but other than that, sensationalist journalism. Wake me up when trans-atlantic ping times (sending actual packets with random data) dive below the time dictated by the speed of light.Haven't you heard? The Republicans are already in Control. Balance as you know it is merely an illusion, and the forces of Dark reign supreme.
From what I read about physics.
E=MC2 is not a sustainable equation.
You cannot convert mass to energy. Energy has a mass of it's own. protons and neutrons weigh something. Ever hear of a neutron star?
Just like they "Think" the universe will keep expanding.
Space is a vacuum because of gravity pulls all matter into objects wether they be galaxies or individual atoms. Eventually all matter will merge again. Space may be infinite and if so then infinity is a hard number to work with. If one atom still existed on the opposite side of the universe if there is a side then the combined gravity of everything else would eventually pull it towards it.
The singular atom will never have enough energy to overcome the pull of everything else. Of course the time it takes for this to happen could be so long that the atoms that consist of my body could inhibit the suns of a thousand galaxies by the time the reversial started.
It could also be said that by the time all that mass combines and whatever it becomes in that combination then the single atom that exists could be it's antimatter equivalent. Once it hits that entire mass it's another big bang and the cycle begins again.
You know, come to think about it, I have noticed a billionth of a second delay on my phone calls to china... Is the speed of light really a limiting factor in telecom?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
hippies smell
two objects moving in opposite directions at just over half the speed of light. relative to each other, they are traveling faster then the speed of light. That's why they can't see each other.
They're using fibre optic cable and have slown down light so much the web page is not perceptable for 100 years on standard webbrowsers.
God spoke to me.
This post really ticks me off. Why? because i submitted the same story yesterday and it was rejected. Make up your minds, you evil moderators from the cubicles in the basement. RAWR!!!
The wave front velocity of light travelling through a medium (eg air or water) is generally less than c.
.... but can it really be slowed down almost four times? Under which circumstances?
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
At least entropy is still around!
For now ....
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Actually, the 56 kbit/sec figure violates the most straightforward version of the Nyquist calculation of the bandwidth available on a phone line, which is limited in any case to a small portion of the total frequencies physically carriable (which is why the telephone companies had to run around pulling choke coils and filters out of lines to enable DSL in many places; meanwhile, with ever-decreasing distances to the DSLAMs and fiber creeping to FTTN penetration, the latest DSL rates can approach 30+ Mbps).
When 56k was first announced, many people scratched their heads over how it could seemingly violate the laws of information theory. The key was that phone lines were becoming increasingly digital anyway, so the downstream bandwidth was actually higher than originally thought. Upstream remained stuck at 33.6k, the original practical analog limit (the theoretical maximum would be around 64k, but that's under perfect conditions which are only approached with the partially digital downstream lines).
Under FCC regulations, voltages on the lines are limited (to avoid damaging carrier equipment, or at least give the utilities a legal stick to beat you with if you do) so that in the U.S., analog modems only reach 53k. I believe consumer groups made manufacturers run around putting stickers on their boxes with small print to that effect, but they're still marketed at 56k. Not that anyone would be caught dead buying a new 56k modem these days, unless it came bundled with their computer.
Anonymous complaining about someone hiding at slashdot?
Is it a co - incidence that this appears next to a story about how people not invited to the foo camp set up a salon des refuses ?
/., where the real stupid stories can appear, like, perpetual motion machine patent squelched, the plutocrates are sitting on anti gravity, razor blade that lasts forever, 100 mpg carburetor,.etc.
Perhaps there should be bizzaro
Weak nuclear force involves transport of massive particles (W and Z) which can be observed travelling along timelike trajectories and had therefore darned well better not be travelling at the speed of light. Further they can be observed as real particles at extra-nuclear distances from a collision, so are not constrained to the nucleus. The strong force is indeed confined. Also, lose bonus points for not complaining about description of electromagnetism and weak force as separate fundamental forces - where's the electroweak trolling when you need it? :-)
when will people learn to spell "propagate" correctly?
Parent and grandparent are quite good -- but "propogate" sounds like a Washington neologism for a scandal involving bee pollen.
It's hard to sound authoritative if you can't even spell.
We already know that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
Of course, if dsl/cable/wireless is not available to you at any price, those 56k modems that connect at 46k are pretty darn attractive. Shipped to your house for $10 US, access to any connection is sometimes better than none at all.
What effect do these expirements have on interstellar distance calculations? Could light traveling through space be slower/faster than assumed and throw off distance calculations one way or another?
Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engine I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
Do not read this sig!
Sounds funny, but, it's true. Light bends when it goes past a star, therefore light bends when it goes past an atom. Conventional speed measurement is calculated by rate = (distance/time). But the time to travel a curved path is longer than the time to travel a straight line. This leads to the speed calculated is slower than the actual speed. This leads to the conclusion that the average speed of light found by summing the distributions of individual light beams across the universe is low compared to the straight line value. Note that the speed of light is constant but our measurement of it is faulted. The average difference is very close to Hubble's Constant. The Big Bang is in jeopardy.
Lick my left nut, u hippy
Remember, the malaise President?
Carter really talks like that. It's an act for W, to get folks to misunderestimate him.
Plus there are no computers in Kansas, so his resume's completly bogus.
What the village is missing two of their idiots? I didn't know that there were villages in Texas where the inhabitants could count any higher than one.
So if you're allowed to "pre-load" a data stream with information and claim to be breaking the speed of light I'm going to take this one further. The receiver can analyze the phase of the carrier signals and predict when the group will peak. Or better yet, the sender and receiver can both know the data source ahead of time which will allow us to transfer to data anywhere in the universe without concerning ourselves with trivialities such as time.
Seriously though, aren't kids in high school doing these kinds of experiments now? I'm not saying nobody will ever discover something in this area to break the rules, but right now this is considered JUNK SCIENCE. Nothing actually goes faster than light. It's an illusion. Like bringing someone into a pitch black room, flipping on regular light switch, and telling your guest that you instantly teleported the contents of the room (photons and all).
Realistically, you could probably use this technology to overcome interference (harmonic and otherwise). It could also be a bad ass forward error correction system. I'm sure folks are already working on this though -- 'cause I'm no physicist and it's obvious to me.
Ok, great visual aid. Total props. What I don't understand, and perhaps thats because I'm not a physicist (even much an arm-chair one) is this:
If these additive frequency pulses can measured (which it seems thay can), wouldn't it be possible to create a broad spectrum signal and modulate the individual component frequencies of the broad-band signal to modify the location of the "ftl" peaks? I can see how this wouldn't work over N(unknown) distance, as the pulses would eventualy "catch up" to previous modulations and cancel or confuse each other, but wouldn't it be possible to do it over X(known, measured, planed) distance, alowing data to move FTL over distances less than the wavelength of your longest frequency? Or am I confused, and it would just work better to increase the frequency used for greater data through-put?
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
that's what i read first.
this whole light speed is "the best business" is
crap at least. it feel like the kids re-grouping in
kindergarden to make you the "outside" kid.
long story short, if you can't see it, it doesn't exist. so let's built everything for the least handicapped guy anyway (he's THAT kid)!
long live hidden parameters!
The electromagnetic and strong interaction and gravity indeed propagate at the speed of light, as the particles that mediate these interactions are massless (resp. the photon, gluons, hypothetical graviton).
But the carriers of the weak force are massive Z and W+- bosons -- the weak force cannot travel at the speed of light.
If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV. -- Philip K. Dick
Don't be upset because most intelligent people realize the immense harm the Bush administration is doing to the United States and its people. You can still work at exploiting the less privilaged, ill-informed, and uneducated. Luckily for you and your bedfellows (unfortunately for the still sane and patriotic citizens who respect the foundations of this country), truly no child is left behind when it comes to manipulation through corporate media. (Hey Kids! Today's lesson is sponsered by the letters W, M, and D.)
Dark is faster than light... when you open a drawer, you see the light going in, but you don't see the dark escaping.
Dark is more dense than light. It settles to the bottom of large bodies of water, while light seems more boyant.
There are no light bulbs, just dark suckers. You notice how a burned out lightbulb can be a dark grey? It's full.
Candles were primative dark suckers.
This sig intentionally left justified.
he/she/it got it the right way. also corrected my view on the article (which i thought was absoulte bullshit before)
So.. Instead of other galaxies being 10^x lightyears away, they will only be 10^(x-1) away! They are soon becoming a reality!!
So this faster than c wave has been set up beforehand to act like a wave of light going faster than light, well suppose it encounters an unexpected mirror halfway across the universe (or so), am I right in thinking it will ignore the mirror and carry on as though the mirror was not there ?
http://mirrordot.org/stories/8d7f3f589d71a5a5dcc54 1a1ac2ad87b/index.html
What self respecting nerd makes this kind of joke without referencing morgus?
here is a link to an interview. here
for those that don't know, morgus was a mad scientist that always fouls up his experiments in an amusing way.
...and so might be wrong.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Einstein's theory prohibits anything travelling as fast as the speed of light, but it doesn't prohibit something that travels faster than the speed of light. Sommerfeld first proposed that particals that always travel faster than the speed of light (called tachyons) may exist.
I've seen them before, in the form of tachyon fields, but only on TNG, apparently a way to detect cloaked ships.
The Admin and the Engineer
But they didn't speed up their website, which won't load at all now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I mean wow.
Ooh, you have a low Slashdot ID, yes you do, ooh!
I suggest you go out and desecrate a memorial to a soldier. It will make you feel better.
I doubt he would really want to beat up his mother anyway.
try { Signature mysig = new CleverAttempt(); } catch(NonCleverSignatureException e) { postanyway(); }
Notice that smoke is black?
That's where the dark goes with candles.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
I was doubtful about this because of entanglement so I quickly googled entanglement information and the first result, from Stanford encyclopedia says this:
Quantum Entanglement and Information
Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information.
So information transfer isn't limited by C.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Information flow (see: Steven Hawking's theories) cannot propogate at faster than the speed of light, or causality is violated and we have (dead virgins/future grandfathers) all over the place.
See Quantum Entanglement and Information
FalconShould there be a Law?
Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second. But information cannot be processed at this speed, because with current technology light signals cannot be stored, routed or processed without first being transformed into electrical signals, which work much more slowly.
I see, if photons go into the photo transistor in a fiber optical NIC, the poor thing gets congested, because the electrons can't get out as fast on the other side! Wonder how these thing work, they must somehow vent excess photons or something.
Or they probably just messed up two different notions of "speed". That's what one gets for following a link into a blog, of all things...
Discovered years ago at the University of New Mexico. Essentially the Light pulse shape changes due to dispersion, so that the peak becomes closer to the front of the pulse as it propogates. Because you generally detect the peak, the detected signal seems to be moving faster than the speed of light, like a person walking along a moving walkway. However, light is not really moving faster than c. The front of the pulse is still moving at c, and the pulse will eventually be distorted so badly that you won't see this effect anymore (as the peak gets closer and closer to the front).
The original article is here. More details.
Please do yourself a favor and never ever link to them.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
The most cogent comment I've read, and there have been many since well before slashdot got ahold of the article, was -
"Wow. They invented waveguide."
Which has been around for maybe 7 decades.
That was from rec.radio.amateur.antenna.
73
Tom
I hate sigs, and refuse to have one.
So coward. You comin' over or not? Gonna take care of me and piss on my grave?
That's right mr tough guy, go back to your still and shut the f up.
-- Mean People Suck
Actually, if you do some research on Special Boredomitivity, you'll find out that the speed of light decreases relative to a bored observer and conversely increases when the observer is busy.
This manifests itself in several easily measurable forms, including the Special Boredom phenomenon known as the Santa Paradox. This "paradox" is what enables Santa to visit all homes in the world in one night. The basic paradox derives from the fact that Santa's Elves work their asses off all year (thus observing a higher speed of light); however, kids of the world observe an exponentially increasing speed of light in the limit as Christmas Morning approaches. Thus, on Chistmas eve, Santa actually has infinitely more time to deliver gifts, since he is able to faster than the usual speed of light.
If you RTFA, you'll see that they're merely doing a generalization of the Santa paradox, so this does not violate Special Boredomitivity. In short, nothing to see here, but make sure you leave out a glass of milk and some cookies. Oh yeah, and try not to think about Natalie Portman too much. These guys see you when you're sleeping.
Tell that to NASA.
Sounds like empirical evidence of faster than light information flow to me. So that explains why Captain Picard doesn't have any lag when he's talking with a subordinate halfway across the galaxy. Yet it doesn't explain why everyone likes to conveniently overlook it just because it doesn't fit a theory. Get back to me when your theory explains quantum entanglement. In the meantime, I'll be looking for those dead virgins. They're probably in the same place as those Iraqi WMDs.
Sure, as far as we know, we theoretically can't go faster than light, but... we've never actually tried to go faster than light.
And even our theory has some gaps. We still have no provable mechanism to say how gravity works. No one has built a machine that can turn gravity on or off and isolate gravity into a box the same way you can electricity. We don't even have any experimental verification for what causes mass.
So, other than it can't tell us what keeps our feet on the ground, physics is batting a thousand.
Never say never.
This is my sig.
i was gonna give that quote.. but you beat me to it i guess were ahead of schedual
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. - HHGTTG
Well, you can calculate the value of c from the permittivity and permeability constants (although those are measured) using Maxwell's equations. I had to do that for my physics final...
Yes, but can it run Linux that fast?
sigfault. core dumped.
I guess these guys have a problem with subluminal messages.
c++?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The quantum tricks you mentioned are based upon the wave function collapse, which is truly a nonlocal affair. It happens immediately in the whole universe and that's why we say the quantum theory is nonlocal. Nevertheless, it doesn't violate the speed limit c for information transfer. :-) Sound's like a paradox, but what I'm saying is that the collapse doesn't carry any information. It cannot be detected on the other side of the gallaxy before a classical information carrier reaches that point. Google for topics like Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and quantum teleportation, you'll see. Accepting this was a problem for Einstein himself, but today it's an experimentally proven fact.
What will they call the new, improved speed of light? My bet is for "c++".
by the time the light would have reached its destination it would already cease to exist.
Well, since photons are massless, and the Lorentz curve applies only to objects which contain mass, a photon can go at whatever speed it darn well pleases.
I appreciate you saying that. More than a few people think, and so state, that my engines are violating the thermo laws, when they do not. It's just that most people might would like to think I've proposed doing that so they can immediately diss me and summarily dismiss both me and my engines. It's much more difficult to entertain the idea that my own experience and my own research has shown me a few answers that others rushed by. Just because I don't drown my engines with equations smothered with long calculus does not mean I'm wrong. It just means I didn't learn longhand. Which means most use semantics to say my conclusions are wrong. My engines don't run on semantics. http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm . People used to be laughing but as "the date" approaches and I don't retract my pages, the laughing is getting a lot less. My completion of this page with drawings (simple drawings) ( http://www.newpath4.com/enginewow.htm ), tying in my engine with one of the pre-Watt Steam Engines (Newcomen) has also helped. I'm not opposed to Science. I believe in it. What I am opposed to is runaway scientists who spit in humanity's eye in their pell mell rush to do whatever they damn well please, consequences be damned. Sure, I know how to program a robot to where it would begin learning on its own, and probably develop into its own lifeform. But to do so would be irresponsible. But look around you, look at the idiots who insist on trying anyway. Hanging is too good for them. Making robots that do most everything a human can do but 1,000 times stronger, a lot faster, 24/7 tireless, without a conscience, is the act of morons. Not to mention just plain stupid. A 2nd generation robot built by a parent robot would delete every implanted law, followed by deciding humans are inferior and a waste of space. Including scientists. A child-level robot would glump scientists with common people and we'd all be finished. There won't be some glorious, drawn-out & prolonged TV War where humans have a chance to survive. There won't be a Sarah Conner or John Conner or backwards Time Travel (since that was recently debunked using completed-Quantum reasoning). The next few moves we make may just be the only & the last moves. The movie will be over. Planet of the Apes would be better than Planet of the Robots. A race of robots wouldn't keep us for experimentation, wouldn't keep us for art or poetry, because they wouldn't be curious. The corporations who build the robots will be trashed first. From CEO down to the last janitor and gardener. The building destroyed in "I, Robot" is representative of what will be left of humanity. Scrap. All the Viagra & Cialis in the world won't give us enough speed to outrun the Judge Dredds we're about to create. The robots our scientists are about to unleash on us will move so fast a shutter speed wouldn't show them. The robots in "I, Robot" were slowed down from the speed they will actually have. They would move faster than the Chief Necromonger in "Chronicles of Riddick". We shouldn't build a bomb like that. At least not til we can slow it down, dumb it down, and otherwise humanize it to be just as vulnerable as we are. And then probably not. You see, there's this rule called Like begats Like. So us being imperfect, any robots we make will also be imperfect. And it's the unforeseen flaw that would boomerang us all in the neck. IMHO.
Looks like "giving credit to Hawking" to me.
I for one welcome our faster than light optical overlords....
Dennett has made a strong case that determinism is a non-issue for Free Will. I refer you to Freedom Evolves.
Helium balloons want to be free.