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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!
I actualy heard when this happened. So, why is it such a big deal? Well if you are representing an entire country, and other countries around the world are watching, do you really want to sound like a moron? Yet that is exactly what happened, America sounded like it was being represented by someone on crack.
What is next, is the monkey going to start calling stem cells "steam seals"? If the guy is going to pretend that he has the slightest clue about something scientific, how about not sounding like a complete moron while doing it? I do not think that is to much to ask from a person who is supposed to represent a country (Even if he did have to buy his election).
I don't know what you are smoking, but what you are saying is just wrong. Most photons you see doesn't have enough energy for electron-positron pair production, not to mention that electron-positron pair production requires another heavy particle to dump momentum to. (You need photon of energy greater than about 1 MeV (gamma rays, and, egh, I don't care to look up the exact value now, but you can get it by multiplying the mass of electron by 2 and converting it to a unit of energy) and another massive particle that the photon can bounce off, since there is no way to go from photon -> electron + positron and simultaneously conserve energy and momentum.)
If you are talking virtual particles, that's an entirely different matter, (and a matter that I feel unqualified to comment on), but wouldn't you think that there is a reason those are called virtual particles? Go learn some science before you talk science. Semi-pseudoscientific use of terms like "quantum" impresses nobody.
P.S. Where did you pull this out of? Your ass? I would imagine current accepted value of c is based on speed of light produced from a laser, which is "coherent". One of the things that says is... the photon that exited the laser is the _same_ photon that enters the detector, not something produced in pair annihilation, which would have a random phase. I only praise /. that you managed to get modded up that far.