Speed of Light Exceeded?

PreacherTom writes "Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that propagates about 300 times faster than light would travel in a vacuum. The pulse seemed to exit the chamber even before entering it." This research was published in Nature, so presumably it was peer-reviewed. It's impossible from the CBC story to determine what is being claimed. First of all they get the physics wrong by asserting that Einstein's special relativity only decrees that matter cannot exceed the speed of light. Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information cannot be transferred faster than this limit. What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature.

Comments

Results of experiment published in the past

[Epsas]

This story is from November 2000. If Princeton scientists *did* exceed the light-speed barrier, then it the evidence would only naturally show up in the past. Interesting!

How do I mod down kdawson and the /. editors?

[osu-neko]

I have mod points, but I can't figure out how to dole out some negative karma to either the person sending in a link for an over six year old story, or the editor who approved it. >:(

Re:You can beat it!

[cyclop]

Well, to be honest the today conception of vacuum is not that of a space completely devoid of everything. Vacuum has an energy, and literally boils of instantly-annihilating particle-antiparticle couples. This has observable effects that have been measured, like the Casimir effect. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy for an explanation.

Re:Information?

[ZeroExistenZ]

Nothing can ever exceed speed of light, not even information,as proved by Hawking.

That, and earth is a sphere in the center of the universe, as Plato proved.