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!

Comments

No big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Overhyped as always

[justanyone]

Mod parent UP.

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.

All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear (not Nukular; bite me, George) forces propogate at the speed of light in their reference frame. If we switch frames we're not fooling anyone; if we preposition information we're not watching causality violations.

This kind of story is quite irritating, not due to the actual achievement involved (playing with light propogation is actually very cool geek-cred stuff), but the overhype and miscommunication to all the laypersons out there who just go, "Yup, that's an 'oops', they said it was a law and now it ain't. I guess evolution might not really be true, dad-gummit, I don't trust me none o' dem smarty pants anyway."

Re:Overhyped as always

[cahiha]

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.

Hawking didn't come up with that idea; why are you giving him credit for it?

All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear (not Nukular; bite me, George) forces propogate at the speed of light in their reference frame.

That has only been demonstrated for electromagnetism; for the other forces, it's a hypothesis.

Nuclear vs. Nukular

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Overhyped as always (Score:5, Insightful)
by justanyone (308934) on Saturday August 20, @12:52PM (#13362326)

All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear (not Nukular; bite me, George)

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

Re:Nuclear vs. Nukular

[Dachannien]

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?

Because before Bush was elected, "nucular" was used as a political tool to represent the argument that Bush is unintelligent. But now, it's used as a symbol of the anger the left feels over Bush being elected twice. When's the last time you ever heard someone complain about "nucular" without some large degree of bitterness in their voice?

Re:Pegged you right on, didn't I?

[Alex P Keaton in da]

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....

Re:here's an example...

[timmyd]

I don't think the shadow would move faster than the speed of light in that case, the time it takes for the light "update" to show up on the wall is just going to take longer when you're really really far away. So if you move something across the spotlight, it will just take longer to show up on the wall. Like how if the sun went out, we'd just know 7 minutes or so later rather than the shadow hitting us instantly...

Re:Overhyped as always

[try_anything]

This is why I skip to the comments when an article sounds too good to be true. Thanks for saving me five minutes.

Re:Overhyped as always

[bunratty]

Information transfer *is* what's limited by c.

That may be what our most current theories say, but theories can always be wrong. We actually don't know if there's an absolute speed limit on information transfer. Remember, science can never absolutely prove any fact about the real world, only come up with models that attempt to describe the phenomena we've seen so far.