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German Physicists Claim Speed of Light Broken
Byzanthy writes "Two German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light by using 'microwave photons.' According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate any object beyond the speed of light. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they did it by using a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling.
The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons — energetic packets of light — traveled 'instantaneously' between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart." New Scientist, however, is running an article that suggests Einstein can rest easy. Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, explains that the German physicist's results aren't necessarily wrong, they are just being interpreted incorrectly.
What are they going to do to fix it?
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
186,000 miles per second, it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
What, me worry?
How am I supposed to welcome our new microwave-photon overlords if they've already arrived?
Information on how to break the light barrier has been around for ages.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070816-fast er-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.html
Doesn't quantum changing of spin happen faster than light would travel between two points? Does teleportation actually breaking speed of light? Otherwise why would it be called teleportation if it's just moving things (really) fast?
The time barrier's been broken, so where's that damn warp drive?
I brought enough for everyone.
-tyfighter
"Microwave photons" are neither "light", nor "energetic".
Photons with a frequency in the microwave region are thousands of times less energetic than the least energetic light photon. Basic Plank's equation, E = hv, you see.
And Einstein need not worry, his basic theory or Relativity covers the fuzzy concept of "simultaneity" and "instanteinity" quite thoroughly.
Guys come out confusing group velocity with the speed of light, from the very first equation I am beginning to suspect that it is the case. I have read the paper, and must question their conclusion as their setup is not entirely clear. This said, everybody loves surprises. Yes, IAAP.
At least, going by TFA, I should be instantaneously like the 8th post AND the first post! w00t!!
Anyway, I'm not all that convinced that the speed of light would require infinite energy to be broken. According to E=MC2 and all the special relativity and all that crabopple, just to travel AT the speed of light requires almost all the energy in the universe and the mass of the object increases to nearly the same amount of mass in the universe (purely from memory and I'm not a scientist/physicist/quantum physicist/lawyer). If such is the case, or something relatively similar to what I just said, then how does a photon, WHICH HAS VOLUME AND MASS, travel at the speed of light without having the same mass/energy as the whole of the universe?
If someone can explain that to me, I'd very much like to hear it.
Halitosis - (n.) Halle Berry's Camel Toe.
Am I mistaken, or is it the old group velocity vs. velocity error again? One thinks it's about time the quantum physicists learn basic wave mechanics, especially as various scientists have made similarly incorrect faster-than-light claims several times now.
You have to walk the plank.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
But if it had broken the speed of light, it should have arrived BEFORE it left. Unless Einstein just happens to be wrong...
but who knows. Atoms are weird. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that when they travel at the speed of light they generate dancing-banana particles which can be explained by a peice of paper and a crayon.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Something like this was claimed a while back. Is it like this guy's experiment where although an adge of a light pulse travelled faster than light, information still could not be transmitted faster than light?
Not discrediting the achievement. This will help us clarify current theories regarding speed limits and stuffz
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
i think you're confusing quantum physics and relativity. Einsten didnt believe in, and tried to disprove, quantum physics, but i dont believe he ever questioned his own relativity theory.
"God does not play dice" is about the inherent randomness in quantum physics.
I'm glad there was a post today to tell me the speed of light isn't broken. I need a reminder every once in a while.
How many German physicists does it take to change a broken speed of light? Answers below:
c++;
Hold on a second here... They say that they've exceeded the speed of light with (drumroll please) Photons! But, wait a minute, isn't that light? However fast those photons were going, *is* the speed of light. It's just that they've discovered that all the rest of the photons in the universe just really aren't giving it their all.
(by the way, this is a joke. I know what they mean, it just seems funny to me.)
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
No it wasn't... (look up group vs phase velocity)
With this new discovery the Germans have made an incredible jump in technological advancement, so Europe prepare for World War III :)
On a more serious note, wasn't it part of the theory that when you travel faster than lightspeed you travel into the future or past? So if they did succeded in surpassing lightspeed how would they be able to tell? (and how are they able to tell anyways?)
We shall call this new Technology:
Way to go Anywhere Really Phast
Or WARP
Light is light, no matter the frequency. I think when you say "light", you're trying to refer to light in the visible part of the spectrum.
The summary does however call photons "energetic packets of light" when I think they're trying to say "packets of energy".
The effect they measured is not new. As they described correctly, the waves are evanescent modes. The thing about these modes is that they do not possess a velocity with a real number value; the index of refraction is effectively imaginary. Imaginary in the sense that you need to consider the square root of a negative number. The imaginary velocity means the modes decay away from the surface (of the prism in this case). But if you have another prism close enough, it can pick up some of the evanescent mode and convert it back to real propagating light (which travels at real light speed).
Since imaginary speed waves die out over long distances, for which we do need "faster than light" speed, we will not be able to use this effect.
Actually that quote is from a letter he wrote to Max Born about his distrust of the theory of quantum mechanics, not his own theory of relativity. Here is the actual quote:
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Its the cosmic constant, not relativity - (See http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~jpl/cosmo/blunder.html) And with the discovery of an exanding universe it seems it wasnt a blunder but he was right.
Photons do not have mass.
r s/960731.html
From: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answe
The Question
(Submitted July 31, 1996)
Do photons have mass? Because the equations E=mc2, and E=hf, imply that m=hf/c2 . Is it so?
The Answer
No, photons do not have mass, but they do have momentum. The proper, general equation to use is E2 = m2c4 + p2c2 So in the case of a photon, m=0 so E = pc or p = E/c. On the other hand, for a particle with mass m at rest (i.e., p = 0), you get back the famous E = mc2.
"Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto ..."
Blame CANADA!
From the press statement:
And there you have it - The McKenzie Brothers' explanation... Beer DOES affect relativity, in a relative sort of way. I guess.
does anyone know how these scientists measured time for this experiment? what sort of equipment do you use to measure picoseconds
And now I turn off my microwave photon gun set to "drippy irony".
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I liked Niels Bohr's response to Einstein's comment:
"Einstein, stop telling God what to do."
On an advancedphysics.org board in 2005 Fernanda summed it up nicely:
"yeah, I'm done with this thread and will order any admin here to close all threads Michael opens regarding photons having mass, weight, size or whatever the heck wacky proposal he has."
I thought that something travelling at exactly the speed of light required infinite amounts of energy. No-one said anything about more than the speed of light.
Check out what happens when X-Rays pass the speed of "light" in water. check out Cherenkov radiation. Irregularwebcomic has a good explanation http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1636.html
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
OK, so now when I put my cold food in the nukerwave, it'll be heated up and done before I press start?
As an aside, I find it interesting how different people interpret Einstein's famous stance on Quantum Mechanics. As indicated in that quote, Einstein felt that Quantum Mechanics was fundamentally incomplete, and was not an accurate representation of reality. Now, many people point to Einstein's disbelief to support their own arguments that Quantum Mechanics is wrong. Thus their argument is: "See! If a smart guy like Einstein says it's wrong, then it's probably wrong!"
However Einstein himself, over his entire life, was never able to disprove Quantum Mechanics, despite many attempts. All the thought experiments and physical experiments he proposed instead bolstered the case of Quantum Mechanics, since the predictions of the theory were verified time and again. In the years since Einstein's death, the case has only gotten stronger: Quantum Mechanics is now one of the most thoroughly and rigorously verified theories we have (along with relativity, of course).
So, the alternate interpretation of Einstein stance is: "See! Even a really smart guy like Einstein is wrong sometimes!" Just because Einstein "felt" that Quantum Mechanics was wrong does not make it so. In this case, his intuition seemingly failed him.
(Incidentally, one thing we do know is that there is a mismatch between our two best theories: quantum mechanics and relativity. It's not at all obvious how to reconcile them, and it is likely that they are both "wrong" in the sense that they both need to be modified to be united into a single coherent theory. However the aspects of Quantum Mechanics that Einstein didn't like (nonlocality, randomness, etc.) are firmly established and are probably not going to be "undone" by even a unified theory.)
They broke it because of Global Warming... the whole world is out of whack... we need a new science... w/ proven results... ...results that are quantifiable... solid... not subject to "misinterpretation" ... non of this crap that we've gotten so far... what has science given us already... geesh.
It just goes to show that journalists have a hard time reporting science.
The Speed of Light limitation is in regards to Matter, i.e. something with Mass. A Photon does not have mass. The component is acceleration! You cannot accelerate matter faster than the speed of light. The reason being as you begin to approach the speed of light, the object in question begins to increase in mass. Thus you need increasingly more energy to propel the object. More energy, continues to increase the mass of the object.
However there is no law against objects that already travel faster than the speed of light. For example, Tachyons. Hypothetical particles that travel faster than the speed of light. However they have never been found.
So a Photon can travel faster than itself - i.e. speed of light because it has no mass. Interesting. The explanation of why it's wrong doesn't jive. The data still prove it got there faster than it should.
Theoretical Physicists have a hard time with Experimental Physicists, mainly because experimental physicists have data to backup the arguments.
While I'm sure there will be the prerequisite warp drive/time travel jokes about this, I think the most interesting aspect lies in potential applications to communications and computing. The potential of quantum computers is already quite impressive, but imagine coupling that with the ability to design a system without concern about the physical proximity of some components. Imagine being able to build a planetary computer capable of answering the question of life the universe and .... everything! Planetary should be big enough for that, right?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Randomness established? What experiment could possibly establish randomness? I'm with Einstein on that one.
Couldn't this be used to reduce latency on inter/intra continental backbones? It be kinda wierd though... If you're talking on VOIP... would the caller on the other end hear your voice before you say it?
Then there's Hawking: "Not only does God play dice with the universe, He sometimes throws them where you can't see them."
It's sorta like this:
:)
1. First of all, the somewhat inaccurare version Newtonian version: when you calculate the acceleration of a small body in the gravity field of another body, the small body's mass cancels itself out.
I mean, the force is: F= G * M * m / d^2
The small body's acceleration therefore is: a = F / m = G * M / d^2
You'll notice that the small body's mass isn't present at all in the acceleration, which in this case is also determining the curvature of the trajectory. Or to put it otherwise, a 1g thumb tack will fly in the exact same orbit as a thousand ton Goa'uld pyramid. As you make mass smaller and smaller, in other words take a limit when mass -> 0, well, the trajectory still stays curved.
2. Actually, in a perverse way, you are right that Newtonian mechanics should not apply to light, and they don't: if you apply Newtonian mechanics to light, the predicted deflection of light is only half the deflection actually observed. So light does act funnily in a gravity well.
Light's curvature in a gravity well is only explained right by Einstein's general relativity. There gravity is just the observed consequence of a distortion of space itself. The presence of a mass there distorts space. The usual analogy is that it's like having a horizontal rubber sheet and placing a steel ball upon it. You'll get an indentation in the sheet. The effects on other nearby bodies, or on their movement, is basically just the consequence of that distortion of space.
And so it is with light too. It's not as much that newtonian gravity pulls it, as just that it's moving through a warped piece of space.
3. Generally, don't try to apply your RL intuition and experience to relativistic or quantum phenomena, it tends to just fail spectacularly
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Clearly this is the classic group velocity vs. velocity error again. And I don't even know what that means.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
And lo, the greatest joke post title ever finally gets to be used!
stuff |
As you aptly noted, I omitted the "C", which represents the Speed of Light, which was likewise absent in this case.
Thus, what appeared to be a simple gaff to the untrained eye is actually a sophisticated reference en passant.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
2) Light can and always could go faster than 3X10^8m/s. 3X10^8m/s is the group velocity of the wave, but individual frequencies of light go faster or slower. Since you need the whole wave packet to know the structure of the packet (ie get information), your stuck waiting for t = D/c time, but you can detect the quicker phases earlier. Read up a good fluid mechanics or advanced optics book for the differences between phase and group velocity.
3) This still doesn't make time travel possible. Time is still going forward, even saying the group velocity of light was broken. You could get ahead of light and see something that happened in the past, earlier than you should have, because you can communicate quicker than light, but it still is an event in the past. You could move to a location you otherwise wouldn't be able to be at by the given time moving below the speed of light, and have an effect you couldn't have had at that point in time otherwise, but you didn't go into the future, in the way normally thought, time kept ticking, you just traveled a different path through space-time, that normally was excluded.
I'm a n00b, or a non-quantum guy. So this may be stupid.
If you have a light which is traveling faster than the speed of light, then isn't there a simple test that can be done to determine if this is actually happening or not? Arrange the light source and a viewer at a distance apart where the speed of light can be empirically measured. Maybe 2 light second apart, so 599584916m apart. Have the viewer remotely start the light source with something such as a laser. If the viewer can see the light turn on in less than 2 seconds, then the light is traveling faster than 299792458m/s. Otherwise, it will take 1 second for the remote signal to reach the light source, a few ns to turn on, and 1 second for the light to get back to the viewer.
If this was legit, it'd be a great experiment for NASA as they could decrease the lag on their games...er..space ships.
Whatever it is it's faster than the speed of light. No matter how fast light is the dark was there before it. :)
I think I'm paraphrasing Terry Pratchett there, btw.
i actually posted this comment tomorrow
I bought it a science gadget store three years ago and it is still rotating.
How about we have one single science discussion where it does not degenerate into a political bashing session. Please. I'd love to be able to read about a cool development in science without having to read about Bush, Clinton, Republicans, Democrats, or anything other than funny "you broke it, you buy it" jokes about the subject. Let's all stop obsessing on politics for just one freaking story. Please?
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
How about we have one single science discussion where it does not degenerate into a political bashing session.
Please do not consider my sig as part of this comment where I say, "Thank You"
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
explains that the German physicist's results aren't necessarily wrong, they are just being interpreted incorrectly.
Without RTFA, let me guess: It could be interpreted as traveling instantaneously, but *no* practical use, such as instantanious info transfer, can be made from it due to odd quantum rules that somehow show up at the last minute to muck up utility. Quantum is the Grand Teaser.
Table-ized A.I.
Disclaimer: IANAP, and it's actually two questions...
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Give them a speeding ticket, of course. If you can be fined $100 for going 15mph over the speed limit, it is left as an exercise to the reader to estimate the fine for exceeding the speed limit by 2.3 billion miles an hour! I think it ought to be illegal to deprive our cash-strapped government from such an amount of revenue. It may even be considered immoral, if you think of all the starving children so much money could feed.
I am so sick and tired of these articles appearing in Slashdot. The titles are always sensationalist. The body is always misleading.
Someone with no understanding of Science seems to get a thrill out of believing something overthrows the order of the Science world, whether it is Cold Fusion, or the speed of light, or quantum theory.
When will it stop?
It is like the monthly news reports in the mainstream media telling us that "surprise surprise" obesity (especially around the belly) leads to heart disease, or wine/coffee is good/bad for you.
Nice Futurama reference.
According to slickypedia, however, any increase in precision of lightspeed would change the length of the meter, instead. Imagine the bedlam- meter sticks everywhere would be obsolete!
+5, Truth
It seesm we have a contradiction here:
... and ....
Well, if the "envelope" of the pulse travels faster then light, in some way, then the information carried by the very existence of that pulse does too, does it not? That is, since the "envelope" is somehow detectable, we assume, lest the experiment would be unsuccessful, then the very arrival of the edge of that faster-then-light envelope could be used to trigger some other process, therefore effectively allowing for faster-then-light communication. Please clarify if this is not so.
The problem there is that you're essentially proposing the equivalent of making a car instantly go from 50 km/h to 200 km/h, without it ever having a speed of 100 km/h in between (or any other between 50 and 200.) Only in this case you're proposing something like going from 0.5c to 2c without ever being at the other speeds in between.
Well... how?
Even if there wasn't the pesky issue of having c in between, that violates even Newtonian mechanics. Savagely. Since you're proposing that speed "jump" to essentially happen in exactly zero time (or you'd go through all the values in between), even by old Newtonian mechanics you're talking about an infinite force.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Seriously.
This is much more characteristic of Microsoft's (a convicted monopolist) anti-competitive practices having something to do with open standards and embrace and extend. I'd finish the thought, but I think everyone knows where I'm going with this one.
Alternatively, this is like a car...
According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate any object beyond the speed of light.
Actually, if I recall it correctly, it was more of a limitation of SToR. You started having to divide by imaginary numbers once you started plugging in velocities above c. Even with a velocity of c, SToR stopped making sense because then you had to divide by 0.
I'm not sure whether anybody is aware of it, but this really is old news. Ten(!) years ago, Dr. Nimtz published an experiment on how to tunnel data (specifically Mozart's symphony) at higher speeds than light. Read about it (in German) here http://www.wissenschaft.de/wissenschaft/hintergrun d/173235.html and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light
/ .
There's even been coverage about his tunneling experiments occasionally in the nightly show "Space Night" broadcast on the German TV station "Bayern Alpha" http://www.br-online.de/wissen-bildung/spacenight
Somehow this experiment keeps turning up now and then, causing wild speculation and discussions every time.
all objects exist with mass
...
photons have no mass
therefore photons do not exist.
light travels at 186,000 miles/hour
photons travel faster than light
photons are nothing
nothing travels faster than light
no wonder I failed logic. It doesn't even make sense to me.
qed
But who said anything about the base of natural logarithms being broken?
It does not apply to me i'm french.
And i do not want to read physics book, it just seems to me ridiculous that they are limits to which object can travel.
And if to YOU, it seems ridiculous because it's not written in a book then i guess we should all stop thinking and assumed that we have reached true knowledge of the Universe,
And maybe i was not clear in my other post but i said that someday somehow they will find something that goes faster than the speed of light (not space folding).
I just cant imagine that we set our limits to plain light, so yes if they want to shred me, go ahead i dont care.
Why does the word 'Orbo' come to mind?
Welcome to Slashdot. You must be new here.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You were also kind enough to omit the first name "Max", just in case some people didn't know what the speed of light represented.
Thus, what appeared to be a simple gaff to the untrained eye is actually a sophisticated reference en passant.
Now if I could just figure out why Euler's constant is to be henceforth disregarded...
i found something interesting
"The effect is even worse than you might think because of what is going on inside the ship. After all, everything inside the ship, including you, is speeding up, getting more and more energy, and getting heavier and heavier. In fact, you and all the machines on the ship are getting pretty sluggish. Your watch, for instance, which used to weigh about half an ounce, now weighs about forty tons. And the spring inside your watch really hasn't gotten any stronger, so the watch has slowed way down so that it only ticks once an hour. Not only has your watch slowed down, but the biological clock inside your head has also slowed down. You don't notice this because your neurons are getting heavier, and your thoughts are slowed down by exactly the same amount as the watch. As far as you are concerned, your watch is just ticking along at the same rate as before. (Physicists call this "relativistic time contraction.") The other thing that is slowed down is all of the machinery that is powering your engines (the dilithium crystals are getting heavier and slower, too). So your ship is getting heavier, your engines are getting sluggish, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the worse it gets. It just gets harder and harder and harder, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get over the light barrier. And that's why you can't go faster than the speed of light."
If mass is the only problem in order to reach the speed of light or to go beyond it then,,,,, if,,,,,in a thousand year, they find that they can shield something so that there is no effect on the things inside so mass augmentation whatsoever is not a factor and that the engines used to propel this machine have sufficient power why then,,,could we not go beyond.
We could also get a cruciform creature like Dan Simmons's Hyperion and just get reconstructed after coming out of our travel
Heh. It's just a visual illustration, it's not the whole model. Yes, the illustration is inexact, in just the way you've described. But it's just a visual aid, no more.
:)
Rest assured that the real equations _don't_ involve rubber sheets and extra downward forces.
The issue there is, well, what was point 3 in my previous message: your RL intuition and imagination fail you miserably in both quantum and relativistic domains. (Here "you" meaning "everybody.") Just because you have the equations, doesn't mean you can actually imagine it, without getting cross-eyed and a nasty headache. Hence such imperfect visual aids as the rubber sheet. That rubber sheet model isn't the actual general relativity model, it's just something close enough to your RL experiences and intuition so you can picture it in your head.
But, yes, it's an imperfect visual aid, if that's what you were trying to say. If you can come up with a better one, I'm sure a ton of physicists and physics teachers will thank you for it
But if you're trying to actually use that illustration as _the_ model, it's a bit like saying that a rose can't exist because the picture of a rose is flat and doesn't smell. Or that a pipe can't possibly work, because the drawing of it is on paper, and paper would burn if you tried to put tobacco in it and light it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't quite understand it myself, but I think that would be referring to experiments like Bell inequalities, which apparently somehow disproves the existance of local hidden variables, which is what most deterministically inclined people (like Einstein) initially suggest when confronted with quantum randomness.
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
The famous double-slit experiment, or in fact just about any experiment dealing with quantum phenomena. Of course, if you like you can choose to believe that it's all determined (although, according to Conway's "free will theorem" you then have to assume your own behaviour is entirely determined) and merely appears in every way as if it were random - but from the point of view of science, by Occam's razor, the reasonable belief is that it truly is random.
I am trolling
A well reasoned response. Thank you.
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
Touché.. Although you did forget the Nazi comparison. I will still give you 3 stars for this one. :)
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
No, I'm not new, and in fact, my un is lower than yours. I was apparently not thinking when I requested logic instead of political screeds. My bad.
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
At the risk of getting trounced on by all the scientists here, i disagree with Einstein's theory about the speed of light. I believe that it's possible to go faster and that we'll eventually (in a few thousand years) have the technology to do so. Einstein's theories are based on what we know of in the universe. We as humans are really rather primitive and haven't even developed a decent form of space travel yet. We know very little about the universe in general. Einstein's theories were based on what he knew at the time. They may stand up for the next 10 years, 100 years, or even 1000 years, but eventually they will be expanded and changed as we gather information on the universe.
I assume I can use my new quantum tunnel NIC to retrieve yesterdays data.
Have they used hand-optimized assembler because C was not fast enough, or because they broke [GC]C?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Well the randomness that Quantum Mechanics predicts has been verified experimentally to a very high degree. That is, the theory predicts that a certain measurement will produce a randomly distributed set of answers, and that is indeed what we measure. The experimental correlations are exactly what the theory would predict. But, although we can perfectly predict the distribution of answers that we will get, we cannot predict any given single experimental run. Hence the result of that run is "random." The classic example is radioactive decay, where the emission follows a very predictable decay, but we cannot predict (even with perfect knowledge about the locations of each atom, etc.) which atom will decay at which moment.
It's subtle, but this is fundamentally different from the randomness of tossing a coin. In principle (according to non-Quantum theory, e.g. Newtonian mechanics or relativity), if we knew the exact location and velocity of every atom in the coin (as well as the atoms in the air, etc.) we could predict whether it falls 'heads' or 'tails.' But for quantum randomness, no such perfect knowledge is possible.
If you want to get more subtle still, it actually is not known whether Quantum Mechanics is fundamentally random or deterministic. It's possible that it's somehow deterministic at its core (e.g. the Many-Worlds Interpretation is a deterministic one). However, various experiments (coupled to Bell's theorem) have shown that there are no "local hidden variables." That is, particles do not carry hidden information that tells them which choice they should pick. So, "local observers" (i.e. people like us, who are *inside* the universe and doomed to forever be entangled with other particles in the universe) cannot, even in principle, obtain knowledge that allows us to be predictive beyond this randomness.
Whether or not the universe is "actually" random then becomes academic. It will always be random to us.
So, that's a long-winded way of saying that, to the extent that you accept that Quantum Mechanics is an established theory (and that scientific theories connect to reality), we have established that Quantum Randomness is unavoidable for local observers making local predictions.
Sorry couldn't resist a bad bun, but I suspect tachyons are one of those things that are scientifically plausible but don't exist. Tachyons would be able to interact with our universe through photons and we don't seem to see a lot of unexplainable photons around.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070816-fast er-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.html /
Nak. Only objects with mass are thought to be unable to exceed -- or even reach -- c. But there is no theory of which I am aware that that prohibits an "object" (using the term loosely) with a mass of 0 from exceeding the speed of light. But IANAP, so YMMV.
Also, don't forget, it was only 50 or 60 years ago that people thought the speed of sound was an impenetrable barrier as well...until Chuck Yeager proved them wrong.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
And maybe she can adopt there.
Spa fon? SQUAA TRONT!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Actually everything already is travelling at the same speed, but in a 4 dimensional space. What we see as "speeding up" and "slowing down" is actually just a change in direction. Travelling at the speed of light means you're moving at a right angle to the time dimension. You can't increase this angle further than 90degrees, it just becomes 89degrees again, measured from the other side (ie, you're travelling backwards in time, getting younger, and moving backwards... which is indistinguishable from travelling fowards in time, getting older, and moving forwards). So, travelling above and below the speed of light inflicts the exact same consequences onto the rest of the universe, which is why saying "travelling faster than the speed of light" is such a redundant thing to say.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
...every time I cast a shadow.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
*whooosh*
... ;)
My "reply" was to a post that was replying to my post.
It was a joke.
Apparently not a very good one
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
In Soviet Russia, politics obsess on you!
You speak as if somebody sat down and arbitrarily decided light was going to be the limit.
An extremely over-simplified explanation:
1. We can figure out how much energy it takes to accelerate a given amount of mass. This can be demonstrated to be true with very simple experiments.
2. Take those calculations and solve for acceleration to very high speeds.
3. The closer you get to the speed of light, the higher the energy requirement goes.
4. At the speed of light, the energy requirement becomes infinite.
This means you can't actually accelerate mass up to the speed of light (or presumably, beyond) because infinite energy is essentially meaningless -- there is no such thing.
Photons are an exception because they're already (and always) moving at the speed of light. There is no acceleration involved.
I've heard people say that it's theoretically possible for something to move faster than light if it has always moved faster than light (again, no acceleration), but I can't recall ever reading a real physicist's opinion on whether that's true, or if it's just somebody applying spoken-language rules to a mathematical equation.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
If mass is the only problem in order to reach the speed of light or to go beyond it then,,,,, if,,,,,in a thousand year, they find that they can shield something so that there is no effect on the things inside so mass augmentation whatsoever is not a factor and that the engines used to propel this machine have sufficient power why then,,,could we not go beyond.
It's pointless to ask a question like that: you're asking people to argue against an imaginary technology.
This "mass augmentation" isn't some kind of field you're passing through, it's how the physical structure of space-time is made. It isn't an effect, it's how the fabric of reality actually works. There isn't anything to shield against or filter out, you would have to literally alter the most fundamental laws of the physical reality.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
I think the problem here is that the speed of light is relative to the medium it travels through. It is very possible that in the experiment stated that they produced an effect that allows photons to travel faster than the speed of light in a medium other than a vacuum. The fact that they used two prisms and microwave radiation as a medium proves only that they exceeded the speed of light in a medium of prisms and microwave radiation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is not possible to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. That is precisely what the limiting factor in Einstein's equation, E=mc^2 expresses. If something were to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, then it would become infinitely massive and infinitesimally small, thus creating a black hole.... The rest is quantum physics, which is so full of theories I don't care to explain, or know for that matter. Everyone thing you know is now false, and everything you thought impossible is now normal. "I feel like I'm in Alice in Wonderland"-- NSA Judge on warrantless wiretapping
The Speed of Light limitation is in regards to Matter, i.e. something with Mass.
Actually, no. Relativity limits the speed of information transmission, too. At least if you want to keep causality. If you can transmit information faster than the speed of light, you can in theory violate causality.
Causality, relativity, FTL - pick two.
No, he's New Here.
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No doubt you know what you're talking about, but I could use a bit more explanation here. (Insert usual disclaimer about me being a dysmathic humanities guy.)
You say that individual frequencies of light travel at varying rates. Do you really mean to say that red light travels at a different speed from blue light (or gamma rays)? That's news to me. So the famous "c" is actually an average of the whole electromagnetic spectrum?
I'm also having trouble thinking about a "packet" of light. Yes, I know about the problems of describing light as particles vs. waves, and all that. But you seem to be saying that "packets" of lights (are they the same as photons?) have parts, and that these parts travel at different rates. So each packet has a length? The fastest part (the "head" of the packet) arrives first...and the tail trails in belatedly? And doesn't an individual photon have a single distinct frequency, in any case? I must be totally misunderstanding you.
I wish we could read the paper this is all based on; I doubt whether the author of the cited article understood the research he was reporting. By the way, c is a constant only in a vaccuum, so any light traveling through prisms (or even air) is going to be going slower than c anyway. Did the researchers claim they had exceeded the speed of light in vacuo?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Ah...sorry. I missed the parent post ;)
-------> (joke)
O
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| (me)
/ \
/ \
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Crap. And now I forget to add the /., apparently....sigh.
tags because I have HTML formatting turned on. Not my day on
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
We know that the speed of light is variable. It can be reduced to feet per second. We know that quantum tunneling happens in semiconductors, like the ones I'm using right now (and so are you). The Germans extended the range of quantum tunneling to 3 feet. We know that x-rays travel faster than the speed of light in water, producing cerenkov radiation. We have known since Alcubierre published in 1993, that warp drive is possible, "violating" the speed of light, but not in such a way that GR or SR (I forget which) is violated. Physicists in the zeitgeist of the times needed an absolute, having rejected the concept of an absolute reference frame for philosophical reasons, and Einstein latched upon light. Lightspeed is an arbitrary absolute.
All I get when I play with microwave photons is a persistent fish smell in the kitchen.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
You got photons on the futon! I aint cleaning up that mess.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
see: here and here
Apparently a mod didn't find it funny either. Oh, well.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I think the point of the parent poster was that if you have a theory, like quantum theory, which predicts that we will be unable to predict certain results, how could you empirically verify that theory, or at least that prediction of it? You could falsify it - by showing that we can in fact predict the results which said theory predicts we should not be able to predict - but just showing over and over that we keep failing to make successful predictions does not establish that such predictions are impossible, and thus does not verify the prediction of our theory that such predictions are impossible. Consider a formally similar "theory" from a very different camp: that certain phenomena do not have natural causes, i.e. they are miracles. While you can falsify this (by showing a natural cause), you can never verify it; at best, all you can show that we still can't tell what the natural causes for those phenomena are, but not that there *are* in fact no natural causes for for those phenomena.
Of course, in general it's practically impossible to ever actually *verify* any scientific theory; we just build our confidence in them because they make many successful predictions and we have been unable to falsify them thus far, despite our best efforts. But it's always possible something new observation could throw a wrench in the whole thing. So quantum theory isn't any worse off in that regard than any other theory. And of course there are logical proofs from the axioms of quantum theory that prove that certain predictions are impossible, but that's just to say that it's a theorem of quantum theory that certain predictions are impossible - which is sort of begging the question, since the question is whether quantum theory is right about that.
Which I guess is pretty similar to your conclusion - if you accept quantum theory as established (i.e. having held up well to testing), then you've got to accept its implications like randomness, including quantum randomness, just as a matter of course. But what people like the GP are saying is that quantum theory's particular prediction that we cannot predict certain things is in itself untestable, and another theory might come along later which successfully predicts the same things that quantum theory successfully predicts, but also predicts that we can make the predictions that quantum theory says we can't, i.e. describes a method for making such predictions. But unless something like that comes along and shows that we *can* make such predictions, it's an open question whether or not we can, because it's impossible to show that we *can't*, and it seems to me a rather defeatist attitude to just say "oh well, it's completely random", just as much to say "oh well, it's a miracle". Maybe it is - but it's more productive to keep searching for an explanation.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
How about we have one single science discussion where it does not degenerate into a political bashing session.
Geeks discussions tend to an almost RainMan-esque single minded droning, especially when it comes to science or anything technical.
Geeks also tend to have a level of political activism approaching that of a tree sloth. A fossilized tree sloth.
A community filled with Asberger's and Asberger's-lite.
During the Bush Sr. and Clinton Presidencies I couldn't have told you who was who. They were all Republicrats. I didn't know who was who, I didn't care who was who, and I liked it that way.
The fact that a bunch of geeks are apparently incapable of discussion any subject - even a reported potential violation of the speed of light - without the Bush situation intruding in one way or another in virtually every single topic... wow. Just how astronomically off-the-charts bad does the Bush situation have to be to do that?
The Bush situation has become like a buffer overrun trashing out into everything and anything in system memory.
Oops... I know I know... that should have been a car analogy. My bad.
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light is made of photons... the speed of photons are consistent... thus, that is how the speed of light is determined. If you can't make a photon travel faster than the speed of light because light is made of photons, thus the speed of light is the speed of the photon. If anything, what they are saying is that they made one photon travel faster than the other... OR... the speed of photons is not constant... but scientists already acknowledge that. What's more interesting is that the properties of one photon or electron (both considered to be "waves", not matter) can be affected by another despite the distance between them... whether that is microscopic or on the order of light years. THAT is the fundamental idea that really shakes the grounds of special relativity!
programming myself into obsolescence
That's why we don't use the metric system in the US!
This is not a case of confusing group velocity with particle velocity. It is also not a case of quantum entaglement. What happens here is that those people found that tunneling happened instantaneously at their experiment, but they reflected all the tunneled photons back to the original side.
Well, now I'm curious about what would happen if those photons wheren't reflected, and how did they "know" about the other side of the prism if they took no time traveling trought it. Does that count as information moving, and (since the answer I get will be no) why not.?
Rethinking email
There have been many, many experiments in superluminosity (things seemingly traveling faster than light), however, quantum tunneling is certainly not a case of information moving faster than light.
Quantum tunneling is when a particle passes through a region in which its presence is disallowed according to classical mechanics. However, in this region, the particle's wave function satisfies the time-independent Schroedinger equation and takes the form of an exponentially decreasing function (as opposed to the time-dependent solutions, which are a superposition of sines and cosines). Since the equation is not dependent on time, it would be a mistake to claim that the particle is actually moving through that space.
So yes, if you choose to interpret speed as distance over time, you could say that something travels faster than light, but at the quantum level such interpretations are meaningless, and you can't even claim that it's the same particle that comes out the other side of the potential barrier.
Ass-burgers? Crossing our borders? Stealing our jobs? Sleeping with our livestock?! I blame Bush!
Thanks for pointing out an error in my critism. The physicist's probably don't share the thinking of the article writer. It seems every other month someone is saying that they made light travel faster than c, or slower for that matter. Usually that is followed by an article claiming this, but not stating that it is phase velocity not group, or they do, but don't explain the difference so people get really excited.
Wikipedia got it right, after I did a little editing of their derivation (they had the final line as vg = v, when it should have been vg = c). See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_velocity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_velocity#Matter _wave_group_velocity
Anyways, this is a subject that requires a lot of math, to properly understand what the formulas mean. In my physics studies, it would have taken 3 calculus courses, 2 classical mechanics courses, and a quantum course to really grasp it. That is what us physicists do, we take ten courses to understand a concept I hope to explain in 5-10 minutes. Not very smart, or very smart depending on the side of the fence your on :)
You appear to understand the concept of the wave-particle duality of light. Light behaves like a particle at times, and like a wave sometimes. The funny thing is light doesn't behave like a wave. A wave is a mathematical construction going both ways infinitely far. What we really mean is a piece of a wave, since it has a fixed source and hits a fixed target. This is a soliton (just like in the Star Trek the next generation episode, with the experimental soliton wave engine, if you ever seen it). From wikipedia's article on soliton's:
1) represent waves of permanent form;
2) are localised, so that they decay or approach a constant at infinity;
3) can interact strongly with other solitons, but they emerge from the collision unchanged apart from a phase shift.
This is a lot of useful properties for our model, 2) localized, so they have a beginning and end, 1) their shape doesn't change as they move through the medium, 3) they are preserved when they go through each other. Think of two different colours of light pointed to meet each other. If you place a screen at the intersection, you see the blended colour, but once you move past it the individual colours still exist. So a soliton has the properties we want to describe light.
When you see light as a wave, you can't distinguish between photons, but they are blended together (superimposed). After a couple more advanced math courses (mainly to get Fourier analysis), you can grind through the math and see that for the soliton to keep its shape, different frequencies will have to move at different speeds. Since one frequency is going up and down faster than the other, the shape would change if they moved together at the same speed. But sense you are seeing light as a wave, you can't see the individual photons, so you have to wait the whole normal speed of light time to make out the whole shape of the wave, ie. get information. You won't have enough information to workout the individual components of the group of photons until the last bit of the packet or soliton reaches the detector.
Now something that will blow your mind. If you take electromagnetism, and express it as a field, and then apply quantum mechanics to the field, you end up with what is called quantum electrodynamics, (you'd be in your last year of undergrad before you may see this, if particle physics is offered at that level at your school, but a lot of people don't see it until their PhD quantum course). Here light is a field (a photon is the particle responsible for transmitting the intera
I tried to measure it once, but I couldn't see the stopwatch.
Actually, no. If you go faster than the speed of light, then there is an inertial frame of reference (as valid as any other, since that's relativity) in which you have gone backwards in time.
I am trolling
OMG - My anonymous coward snail is after me again... =D
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
It never ceases to amaze me how people get "internet muscles". But I'm sure that's not the case here. Wow, you are indeed a bad-ass, and most likely talk to people like that in real life. I salute you. Step aside folks, a real man is stepping through. tool.
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
*sigh* Discoveries like these are all to often over sensationalized by the media.
The actual paper by Nimtz and Stahlhofen is available in the arXiv, a physics preprint server: http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0681, I'm surprised it wasn't linked to in the article.
The non-communication theorem seems to be predicated on the idea that we cannot select a quantum state without observation, and that observation can only occur by re-entangling quantum particles. Because re-entanglement would break the prior entanglements, this would prevent using, say, electrom spins in faster-than-light communications. However, I believe that this may be predicated on a technological rather than an essential limitation as I will explain below (and provide details of an experiment which should prove or disprove my theories). Feel free to experiment along these lines. I can always find this post if you don't give me credit
In short the untested (and thought to be untestable) question is: Is the limitation one of actual shared information? Or is it one of the mechanics of quantum entanglement?
Imagine the following aparatus: pairs of photons emitted out opposite sides of an aparatus similar to the Bern fiberoptics experiments. Polarity of photons is entangled. As in Bern, we can shift that polarity and show a corresponding shift on the other side. Unlike the Bern experiments, we attach in the fiber-optic lines, small birefringent beam splitters that split the beam into different components based on polarization. All substances have refractive indexes so introducing a device which changes the refractive index for portions of the beam based on polarization components should not introduce additional quantum entanglements.
Now we should be able to test the following questions:
1) Now that we have selected streams of entangled particles without direct observation or quantum entangelment based on quantum properties, are they still entangled?
2) Can we use such a system for teleporting information across a distance connected by fiberoptic cables?
and of course the larger question:
3) Is the noncommunication theorem predicated on essental quantum limitations or is it simply a technological limitation?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Photons have no standing mass. I.e. if you were to "stop" a photon, it would cease to have mass (technically, its mass would be infinitessimal).
Einsten predicted that as an object approaches the spead of light, its mass would increase to infinity.
The question is: what does 0 * infinity equal? In this case, the photon moving at the speed of light (an infinite number of times greater than its standing mass of 0) has a small, but finite mass hence the momentum, gravity lenses, etc.
It might be more appropriate to say that a photon has an infinitessimal standing mass, and a small but finite mass while moving at the speed of light.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Lots of things appear to defy the basic laws of gravity- Hot-Air balloons float upward, feathers fall slower than rocks, wood floats on water. All of these things could be used to 'disprove' gravity. Even if you know about Air Pressure and can disprove the above discrepancies, it's not evident that Gravity is constant everywhere, or that planetary motion (and solar motion) can be explained by gravity.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Interesting thought. If you didn't have any mass then you would be pure energy (discounting the hypothetical possibility of dark matter and dark energy) and therefore could travel as fast as a photon (an energy entity). However, even pure energy doesn't travel faster than light, so I suspect that even of we find a way to have mass act like energy we will still not be able to go faster than light.
As far as I have read (I'm no physics scientist) the only way anything has managed to go faster than light from our perspective is by expanding spacetime itself. So I think that's our best approach to this problem. Learn to warp spacetime by artificially bringing two separate places closer together and then cross the intervening space and voila, faster than light travel in our {3|4|10|11} dimensional universe.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
- It exists. Yup.
- It has volume. Nope. It has one measureable spatial quality, which is wavelength. To ask what the other two dimensions of a photon are ('volume' implies three) is meaningless. Remember, a photon is a packet of energy, a propogating electromagnetic wave (the electric and magnetic components at right angls to each other). It has no well-defined volume.
- It is "detectable as a particle/atom or whatever". Ummm... Oh dear. A particle, in some sense, certainly: google "wave-particle duality". An atom, no.
To get back to the issue at hand, the thing which might be confusing you is that is has no rest-mass. If it *did* have rest-mass, it couldn't move at the speed of light. But it certainly does have mass in the sense that it is moving, so has kinetic energy, and, as Einstein pointed out, energy and mass are just two words for the same thing. It's energy due to its momentum is given by E=h*frequency=hc/wavelength.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
5/7 of the speed of bad news, but only half as fast as the speed of rumours.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
...that was partly responsible for this whole mini media frenzy, I just wanted to add a couple things. First off, the media coverage has been (I suppose not surprisingly) all about reporting Guenter Nimtz's sensational claims without hearing from the other side. The other side, in this case, is definitely the mainstream point of view... and Aephraim Steinberg at the Univ. of Toronto makes a very compelling counter-argument. The train analogy he uses is helpful.
But if you want to get more geeky, you don't even need to use any quantum mechanics or even relativity to explain what Nimtz is observing. You can also explain it using good old classical physics. What Steinberg is saying is that the microwave, which is a packet of some finite size, gets slightly delayed as it hits the edge of the prism. There's a component of the wavefront that continues propagating into the gap past the reflective surface. (Technically, this is called the wavefront's "evanescent mode" -- meaning it has a wavelength measured in imaginary numbers... so there's no physical wave in this region of space.) And if there's a small gap separating the two prisms, the wavefront returns to the physical world, with a real wavelength again, back inside the second prism. That's what quantum physics would call "photon tunneling." The seemingly faster-than-light transmission speed is just the consequence of the wavefront's being slowed down at the boundary between prism and air. So the sum-total of time the wavefront spent in transit seems faster-than-light when you only look at one portion of its overall trip. But other portions of its trip (i.e. at that boundary between prism and air) were being slowed down.
Of course to explain this in all its gory detail -- and I've kind of done a butcher job here -- requires a lot more words than we had room for in this piece. So the train analogy had to do.
The other thing, to get even more geeky -- and extra-credit is definitely awarded to anyone who picked this up in the story -- there is no such thing as 33 cm microwaves. (Wavelength too long.) That's a typo. It's 33 mm.
Consider this a big ol' nerdy D'OH!
Well, we can mostly agree then. As I was saying, that visual aid isn't accurate at all. Doubly so if taken literally.
There are even more problems than you describe. The dragging the space frame for a rotating body (e.g., Earth) is probably more accurately described by a gas, than by a rubber sheet, for example. A rubber sheet would just get twisted and start offering more and more resistance.
It's just that noone else figure out a way to visualize those equations. There just isn't any good way, same as (at the other end of the spectrum) there's no good way to visualize something that's both particle and wave. So we're kinda stuck with it as the thing which comes the closest. Although, as you correctly noticed, not that close at all. You do have to make the mental exercise of ignoring that you use gravity to explain gravity.
But, as I was saying, if you can come up with a better one, we'll all be grateful for that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Criticism of our nations worst president will get old the day all the damage done to our Constitutional government has been undone. Not a day sooner.
Anyway, if it's off topic let the mods do their job and quit bitching.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
But, "Do Dice Play God?"...
Listen to my music.
Now we can go back to visit Einstein and laugh(ed) at his face.
Seriously, guys, don't quit your day jobs. I may have to start filtering on the "funny" comments...
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Afaik, Einstein and many others were presented with 'adjusted'
Maxwell Equations according Dr. Heaviside in 1875.
In 1993 Art Bell had a radio interview with Al Bielek, where
Bielek said the following:
"Thomas Bearden has gone through this also, and derived the fact
that the original Maxwell equations as written by Maxwell in the
hand written versions, which are well over a hundred years old, are
_not_ what is currently taught in the universities, because Dr.
Heaviside in 1875, because they were hard to understand, and they
could not accept the idea that in the denominator E, as the
electrostatic field, was in Maxwell's original equations stated
that it propagates instantaneously throughout the universe, which
would immediate violate all of the ideas of relativity and c being
the limiting speed of everything in the universe.
So that part has been eliminated basicly from most of the college
texts. You may have some texts that show the original but I'm not
familiar with every book that is around. But nonetheless they
normally teach the truncated version developed by Heaviside in 1875
which was an attempt to simplify those equations and make them more
understandable."
So there's something hidden from public knowledge inside Maxwell's equations.
I made a webpage about this :
"Dark Matter, a result of the heliocentric doctrine "
http://crashrecovery.org/fixedearth/
See also
"Interview with Lt. Col. Thomas E. Bearden"
by Terry Patten and Michael Hutchison
http://twm.co.nz/beard_interview.htm
Robert
As others have noted, Einstein's comment was about quantum mechanics not relativity. More specifically, at first he thought quantum mechanics had to be wrong. Ironically the efforts he made to prove quantum mechanics wrong, when tested in a laboratory, all wound up being the most powerful experiments proving quantum mechanics right. After accepting quantum mechanics, Einstein then spent the last 30 years of his life attempting to unify relativity and quantum mechanics into a single whole.
Relativity talks about big things and quantum mechanics talks about small things, and there's a really ugly incompatible seam dividing them. Gravity and quantum mechanics pretty much explode in a mess of errors when you try to use them at the same time. You can work with relativity *or* with quantum mechanics, but only so long as you pretend the other doesn't exist. Atoms and other quantum mechanical things are so small that the force of gravity is effectively zero, so quantum mechanics works fine if you pretend gravity doesn't exist. And things that have real gravity are so big that all quantum mechanical effects pretty well vanish, so relativity works just fine if you pretend quantum mechanics doesn't exist. About the only place gravity and quantum mechanics both have detectable effects at the same time is in connection with a black hole. Gravity+quantummechanics breaks down in a mess around black holes. Nobody has been able to take a close look at a black hole in a lab, heh, so we haven't been able to see exactly where and why gravity+quantummechanics goes astray around black holes. We haven't been able to look at how nature actually *does* bridge the incompatible seam between gravity and quantum mechanics. Einstein spent 30 years of his life attempting to build a bridge between them, and thousands of scientists since then have tried. There's some potentially promising work in the area, but no one has yet succeeded.
As far as Einstein's "God" comments, he did not believe in the Torah or the Bible or any Judeo-Christian personal God. When he said "God does not play dice with the universe", it's meaning was more like if a mathematician said "Those equations are ugly, there must be an error somewhere".
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Randomness established? What experiment could possibly establish randomness? I'm with Einstein on that one.
It's some pretty advanced stuff, but yeah, it really is pretty well established.
There are experiments that demonstrate that real pre-existing values do not and cannot exist.
I'll attempt to give a simplified example. Imagine you have a particle with three values A B and C (or three entangled particles with one value each). These values can each be +1 or -1. Due to the laws of physics it is impossible to measure all three of them... there is simply no way to even attempt it. You can measure any two. If you mere A and B, they are always opposite signs. If you measure B and C, they are always opposite signs. If you measure A and C, they are always opposite signs.
There is no possible way to fill in three actual values for A B and C at the same time.
That sort of situation crops up in multiple different ways and multiple different situations in quantum mechanics. The proof is really deep and powerful, and if you want NonRandomness as a fundamental rule of reality you have to abandon some other equally fundamental rule of reality. If I recall correctly you are still stuck with Randomness even if you throw away Locality, and that pretty much the only way to keep NonRandomness is to abandon Causality. And abandoning Causality pretty much throws the entire understanding and meaning of reality itself right down the crapper.
There are basically three different ways of explaining / dealing with quantum mechanical nondeterminism(randomness). One is the metaphysical Copenhagen Interpretation, which pretty much says that A does not have a value until you look at it and it randomly becomes +1 or -1. The second is the metaphysical Many-Worlds Interpretation, which pretty much says that there is both a +1 A and a -1 A, and that when you look at it everything splits into two subjective universes and there's a version of you that sees +1 A and a version of you that sees -1 A... and while that makes the universe as a whole non-random it is *subjectively* random whether any given version of you will see a +1 or -1. The third way of dealing with it is the Practical NonInterpretation that the math is works and the physics is right and it doesn't matter if it doesn't make any sense quit wasting time with silly meaningless issues about how or why it happens and whether it is random or not... it is what it is and just do the damn math and get the right answer.
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." -- Neils Bohr , the father of quantum mechanics.
"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks." -- Albert Einstein
"If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy,
that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them." -- Max Planck
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New rule please,
You have to have an ID less than 100,000 to make any "You must be new here jokes". If we agree to set it much lower please disregard this post.
Sit... Speak.... Shake.... Good Dog!
A gaff is a hook for landing fish or a cockney's home. The correct word is gaffe
This experiment is one I performed in my second year of my (ordinary not honours) physics degree thirty three years ago. The tunneling takes zero time as the photon does not transit the gap. The total journey time however is limited by the speed of light in the media involved. I could dig out my project report but this is ancient history as Einstein himself first performed this as a thought experiment and explained away the apparent breaking of relativity.
I think you accidentally attached your reply to the wrong post/person.
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So they should be allowed to break it.
Talking about light speed what if we could travel at Near Light Speed ?
These folks say it possible.
http://nlspropulsion.net/default.aspx
At the risk of sounding closed-minded, I find none of the three satisfactory. I need to do some serious reading on the actual experiments; but as far as the dual-slit experiment goes, it has always seemed to me that there were better explanations than a particle that can tell if it's being watched. But like I said, I should read more before criticizing.
Based upon what was it decided that it's the principle of measuring the particle itself, rather than the our technological limitations of measuring a particle without disturbing it, that is the cause of the particle changing the state (or collapsing the wave function or whatnot)?
What I'd really like is a text that not only details the theory, but gives all the experimental background for why the the theory is what it is. Any recommendations?
I did a little more background reading on the Bell Inequality experiments. It seems first of all, that theorizing that events are random, which is to say acausal, is a much extreme position than to say, for example, that particles are interacting instantaneously at a distance. I acknowledge that with my limited knowledge I could be way off base, but my inclination is that the up and down spins being measured could be so much more easily explained by considering that the measurement techniques are actually aligning the spin along the axis being measured. If that is so, the probabilities referring to spin along multiple axes simultaneously make no sense, because they can't t exist simultaneously, and so Bell's Inequalities should not be valid as applied to those experiments.
Anyway, I have no problem with the idea that such-and-such follows a certain distribution, and we currently have no way to know more than that. But it seems like the default assumption should be that such-and-such is following some sort of deterministic law, and we just haven't figured out how to see the mechanism for it yet. The leap to non-causality seems extreme for the amount of evidence that exists to suggest it.
Based upon what was it decided that it's the principle of measuring the particle itself, rather than the our technological limitations of measuring a particle without disturbing it, that is the cause of the particle changing the state (or collapsing the wave function or whatnot)?
:)
While I can see you're reaching for exactly the right sort of question about exactly the right thing (collapse of the wave function), I can't quite piece together the words you wrote into a comprehensible answerable question
At the risk of sounding closed-minded, I find none of the three satisfactory.
Physicists have been dealing with exactly that ever since quantum mechanics was first conceived. I included a couple of quotes to illuminate that in my last post. The physical realities of quantum mechanics violate fundamental aspects of common sense. Anyone who does not think quantum mechanics is bizarre has not understood it.
The "collapse of the wave function" is a physical phenomena entirely beyond normal human experience. It is absolutely real, but how it works and what it can and does do is entirely beyond normal human experience. In human experience, things happen or they don't, the things that do happen are real and the things that don't happen are not real. But in quantum mechanics, things that *could* happen but *don't*, *are* real. Quantum mechanics operates on sort of the "sum" of every possible thing that *could* happen that then collapses down into one thing that does happen, but the things that didn't happen are "real" and have a real effect on what does happen. It's like you send out a wave that goes everywhere it could go and hits everything it could hit, except that it's a "virtual" wave and doesn't actually touch or affect anything that it hits... and after the virtual wave has gone everywhere it could go and hit everything it could hit, then the virtual wave "magically" picks one point on it's surface to collapse down to and hit like a particle.
One example of the bizarreness and the "quantum reality" of things that didn't happen, one paper I recall was about how you can have an unknown object in an opaque box with a hole in the side, you can send photons outside the box *past* the hole, you can have *none* of the photons actually pass through the hole into the box, no photon ever hits the object inside the box, but the fact that there was in infinitesimally small chance that any given photon *could* have gone through the hole and *could* have hit the object changes the shape of the virtual wave function outside the box, and you can create a "photograph" of the object inside the box. No photon ever went into the box, no photon ever hit the object, but the fact that (no matter how remote the chance) that it *could* have and *didn't* is in some sense a real event that did happen and did have an effect.
There is absolutely nothing in human experience that behaves in this way. There is no analogy. It is simply physical mechanism outside our experience and outside of our range of "common sense".
The "A B C" example I gave also shows that it is not merely a technical inadequacy when we are unable to measure certain things. The laws of physics say And B have to have opposite signs, B and C have to have opposite signs, and A and C have to have opposite signs. The fact that we can't measure all three at the same time is not a technical inadequacy... it is physically and logically impossible for all three A B and C to *HAVE VALUES* at the same time. It is only physically and logically possible for two of the three values to exist at the same time. You can have A=+1 B=-1 C=undefined, or A=-1 B=+1 C=undefined, or one of the other combinations with A or B undefined. There simply is no independent hidden real value that you *could* fill in for that unmeasured undefined letter that would be logically valid.
In human experience that sort of physical behavior simply does not exist, and makes no sense. In our experience things have to exist with actual values.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I have no problem with concepts that are merely contrary to what sensory experience has prepared me for, like Relativity, and for that matter like many mathematical concepts, which I consider as real as physical reality, like transcendental numbers and like calculus. But when we deny things like cause and effect, and allow ourselves to say that things just happen nondeterministically, it seems to me that we violate the principles which allowed us to start doing science in the first place. Violating common sense is one thing, violating reason is another. And at least so far, I haven't seen the evidence requiring us to do so.
For example in this, which is very interesting, it seems that X went into the box, and X wasn't a photon. The real bizarreness seems to come from describing X as the potentiality of the photon's motion, rather than some real, physical, and unknown wave which happens to determine the motion of the photon. I.e., the wave that all photons surf on.
HA HA HA!
No doubt Erwin is turning over in his grave, laughing at this one.
But he might not be.
Perhaps he's just in a 1/2 spin...
Shall we consult the quantum oracle?
.
- aqk
F U
It is an incorrect assumption of path that leads to claims of superluminal propagation with prisms. Evanescent fields (non-propagating fields) give everyone headaches and now headlines. But the claims were debunked in 2001. Check out: http://utol.ecen.ceat.okstate.edu/papers/paper70.p df
or
http://utol.ecen.ceat.okstate.edu/papers/paper66.p df
Feel free to educate me.
This is not a signature.