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FTL Currents May Power Pulsar Beams
thomst passes along news out of the recent AAAS meeting of a new explanation for pulsar beams that involves faster-than-light currents. Here are Los Alamos's press release and three related papers on the arXiv. "The new model explains the beam emissions from pulsars as products of superluminal currents within the spinning neutron stars' atmospheres. According to the authors' model, the current generated is, itself, faster than light, although the particles that compose it never individually exceed the universal speed limit, thereby preventing Einsteinian post-mortem rotation. The new model is a general explanation of the phenomenon of pulsar beam emissions that explains emissions at all observed frequencies (and different pulsars emit everything from radio waves to x-rays), which no previous model has done."
Can we replicate this and add information to the current to transport information faster than the speed of light? (The real problem.)
It was my understanding that information in general cannot exceed the speed of light. Is this not the case, or do FTL currents somehow not transmit data FTL?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
If the current generated is faster than light, does it imply that information carried by the current could potentially be faster than light?
Has Google filed its patent yet on "Method and Materials to Power a Pulsar Beam Using a Faster-Than-Light Current"?
No.
For a detailed explanation, see the next guy's post.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
A disco ball. Shine a light on a disco ball, and project those cool reflections onto a surface more than a few light-seconds away. You'll see that the spots move much faster than light.
Still no FTL movement or information transfer. Still no violation of GR or causality. Just another nice, attention-grabbing headline.
GJ Slashdot for making me search for "Einsteinian post-mortem rotation". Well played.
Taking bets on how long it takes to come up on Google Trends.
[ I'm referring to the concept of seeing something that moves faster than the speed of light, not anything else here, just so it's clear ]
Consider this situation --
You've got a big sphere. Let's say it's 93 million miles in radius (the size of our radius around the sun -- it's a figure we're all familiar with anyways.)
In the middle of this sphere is a man. He has a laser, and he's shining it on the sphere. Since the man is still, the laser is not moving.
But, then the man starts spinning, once per second. The laser takes about 8 minutes to reach the edge of the sphere, but once it does, the dot starts going around the outside of the sphere, once per second. If you do the math, that means the dot is moving 584,000,000 miles per second -- which is about 3100 times the speed of light.
The light from the laser is still going at the speed of light, but the dot appears to be moving at over 3000 times the speed of light. But it's just a location -- the spot that the laser is hitting right now -- it doesn't mean that something tangible is exceeding the speed of light, and therefore Einstein isn't proved wrong by it.
My point is, it doesn't require some really strange neutron star situation to picture a situation where something might appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light.
Ah yes it's time again to break out the old phase vs group velocity explanation again. There are plenty of things that can go "fast than light", but repeat after me, you cannot transmit *information* faster than light. There are many concepts in our current understanding of physics that you just take to be inviolate like conservation of energy, momentum, speed of light. That's not to say we those concepts might eventually be superseded but as a general rule of them any theory that doesn't follow them is probably pseudoscience and wrong. Physics develops from what proceeded it, from Newton to Einstein to Quantum Mechanics to String Theory, and those conservation laws always held. Perhaps reformulated in a different manner to stand for different things but they still held. You don't need to know the details of how a proposed "perpetual motion machine" may work to know that if the crackpot building it says that it violates the law of conservation of energy then it doesn't work.
Suppose you build a railroad track that goes all around the planet. Suppose you've got a train that's the same length as the track, with a track on top of it.
Now, stack up that same model until you have one dozens layers. Now suppose each train never goes above 1/10 of the light speed. The top train, however, will be moving faster-than-light relative to the ground.
I have come back in time using the faster than light technology developed from pulsar beams in the year 2010 to tell the world NOT TO DEVELOP THE TECHNOLOGY!
Everyone just zips around everywhere and the infrastructure of the world crumbles. Don't let it happen to you!
This is a falsifiable hypothesis. Does anybody know where Einstein's grave is? I would like to conduct a skeleton rotation experiment.
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We know the speed of light in some mediums is less than c (see cherekov radiation). Is it possible the speed of light is greater than c in some mediums? You have to admit that a neutron star is pretty exotic stuff. What about negative-index metamaterials? Beyond that (and this may be non sequitur) maybe a concentration of "dark energy" has properties we don't understand.
Birth is the leading cause of death.
The first law of thermodynamics is you do not talk about thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics is you do not talk about thermodynamics
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It's interesting to watch as the /. crowd's replies to the technical question in the post become both less succinct and more smarmy as you get further down the comments. I have not yet attempted to correlate this phenomenon to user id number.
This is a falsifiable hypothesis. Does anybody know where Einstein's grave is? I would like to conduct a skeleton rotation experiment.
Einstein's brain was removed for study and his body was cremated and the ashes spread by a river in New Jersey. The skeleton rotation hypothesis is therefore certifiably false.
FWIW, this is from the American Astronomical Society (AAS), not the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). One of my more frequent typos.
FTW!
Take a Rigid Caron nano-tube that is one LY long and firmly grasp one end and wave it around wildly, the far end of it will be travelling FTL!!!!
Of course how heavy is a 1LY long rigid carbon nanotube?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
find a mass relay.
Bummer.
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Not talking travel here, on indoles I go to psychic internets only explicable by mass habitation of Sol system (unlikely) or FTL radio (probable given entanglement and non-locality)
Good luck
So if I have two lights one mile apart, turn the first on, then the second a split second later, the edge of the "object" has traveled faster than light? If you've got the perception of a stable object even though it's really just the flashes of light of billions of new photons each second, it's not an object in a physical sense. You could send one photon one direction, and another in the other, and if one hits a split second before the other, the object didn't suddenly move that great distance.
"Einsteinian post-mortem rotation." That is all.
I'm promoted to the status of god-like observer. I'm looking down on the solar system perpendicular to the ecliptic, i.e. I'm watching earth circle the sun. Using my magic powers of awesome I wink the sun out of existence. With my magical omniscient eyes I will see the Earth continuing to orbit something that no longer exists for the eight or so minutes it takes for light to move from the sun to the earth. At the time the last ray from the sun hits Earth, the sun's gravity will be cutting out. That's because gravity waves are supposed to move speed of light. That just strikes me as spooky.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
A mono molecular carbon filament, held together by molecular attraction itself, a 1/2 LY long. Crack it, as long as it holds together, would something that light in weight, would it approach the FTL limit?
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
What is described in the parent post is not how it would appear if this experiment was actually done.
Take a circle of 1 l.y. radius and turn a laser in the center pointing at the circumference. A year later a dot would appear on the circumference. Now spin the light source 360 degrees in 1 second.
Why would the light at the circumference spin in 1 second if took 1 year for the original light source to appear? Here is a prediction. Once you spin the source of light, the light dot would disappear completely.
You have now divided the intensity of the light in the dot across the circumference to a point where it's not even meaningful. Only a few photons would reach an odd point on the circle's edge a light year after that photon took off the light source. There is no FTL movement of the dot even in this case! Each photon leaving the light source would struck a point at the circle's edge a year later but there will not be enough photons striking any single point to be any different from noise.
The IMAGINARY light dot made it across the circumference at speedsd faster than light, but not a real one.
You can't handle the truth.
Actually, its even possible for the group velocity to exceed the speed of light, without violating relativity/causality. See for e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0101068
Can someone explain this to me? Google doesn't seem to help much. What does it refer to and what physical properties are involved in its occurrence? Thanks
So if you're waving a laser beam across the Moon, imagine the beam vaporizes that part of the Moon and emits a pulse at the point of impact. You could see a line of energy being emitted from the Moon, with the location of the end of the line changing faster than the speed of light.
Another prediction of the superluminal model for pulsars is that there should be a component of the pulsar's flux that decays as 1/distance, rather than as the conventional inverse-square law.
Does this mean that the pulsars are quite a bit closer than first supposed, given that the norm is 1/x^2, or are they less luminous that first thought?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Don't people tire of this? Its always "FTL" this and "FTL" that ... And by the way pay no attention to the huge honkin asterisk clarifying what is really meant by FTL.
This is the same group vs phase velocity nonsense that is always used successfully to attention whore the media.