Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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 That's not to say we those concepts might eventually be superseded but as a general rule of them any theory that doesn't follow them is probably pseudoscience and wrong.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.
It's comments like this that keep me reading /.
Quantum entanglement is like a coin. Once you know one side is Heads, the other side is "instantaneously" Tails.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Maybe in *your* country...
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.