Faster than light?

[Night Train]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...cispeed116.xml

Wow! Wouldn't it be great to actually get somewhere before you even left the house? Think of what this will do for Pizza delivery!

[Pete Hanlin]

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

Can you imagine coming home from your day at the office and answering the question "Hi honey, how was your day?" with "Oh just fine- I undermined the world's entire understanding of space and time... what's for dinner?"

[gemstone]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT7bA...related&search=

[Night Train]

I love this song. In fact, I was just going to sit down tonight to watch THE MEANING OF LIFE one more time. "Every Sperm is Sacred....Every Sperm is good...."

:)

[k12311997]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT7bA...related&search=

thanks I really didn't need the extra encourgement to feel small and insignificant.

[optical24/7]

"Warp 4 Scotty!".......

:D:D

[gemstone]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jd1I...2Dlight%2Ehtml

Try this one

[rinselberg]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...cispeed116.xml

Wow! Wouldn't it be great to actually get somewhere before you even left the house? Think of what this will do for pizza deliveries ...

What Britain's Telegraph said:

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time . . . The pair say [that] they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to [a meter] apart . . .

The "speed of light" (short for the speed of light in a perfect vacuum) is what is generally understood as the "universal speed limit" that arises from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.



The arrows represent the travel of photons using closed Perspex prisms (diagram; left) that are transparent to microwave energy ... and open prisms (diagram; right). The open prisms, separated by an air gap or "tunnel" of up to a meter, comprise the experimental setup. The experimental finding is that the photons traverse the distance separating the prisms (i.e. the air gap or "tunnel") at superluminal speed; not just superluminal, but instantaneously, so far as the experiment is able to determine. In other words, the photons traverse the meter's distance of air separating the prisms as if it were not even there. Or to put it still another way, it's as if the air that separates the prisms in this experiment exhibits (loosely speaking) a refractive index of zero.


Here's what the two German scientists reported:

Feynman, [who was] one of the founders of QED (Quantum Electrodynamics), introduced virtual particles in his diagrams as intermediate states of an interaction process. Such virtual particles are not observable. However, from the theoretical point of view, they represent necessary intermediate states between observable real states. Such virtual particles were introduced for describing the interaction process between an electron and a positron and for much more complicated interaction processes. Other candidates for virtual photons are evanescent modes in optics. Evanescent modes have a purely imaginary wave number and represent the mathematical analogy of the tunneling solutions of the Schrödinger equation. Evanescent modes are present in the forbidden frequency bands of a photonic lattice and in undersized wave guides (for instance). The most prominent example of the occurrence of evanescent modes is FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) at double prisms. In 1949 Sommerfeld pointed out that this optical phenomenon represents the analogy of quantum mechanical tunneling. The evanescent modes (i.e. tunneling) lie outside the bounds of the Special Theory of Relativity. We demonstrate the quantum mechanical behavior of evanescent modes with digital microwave signals at a macroscopic scale of the order of a meter and show that evanescent modes are well described by virtual photons predicted by former QED calculations.

To condense all that to just a single statement: "The evanescent modes (i.e. tunneling) lie outside the bounds of the Special Theory of Relativity."

See Macroscopic violation of special relativity; Nimtz and Stahlhofen; Quantum Physics; August 5, 2007.




Virtual photons! Why didn't I think of that ...

[rinselberg]

Kudos to Night Train for posting that article from Britain's Telegraph.

DailyTech ran an article about the same length as the one in the Telegraph, but it's a more informative report. I recommend it. Find it at ...

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8487

[ksquared]

AND now for the rebuttal...(geeesh....sorry to burst another bubble.)

A paper submitted to the physics arXiv has been picked up by a number of major news outlets (e.g., the Daily Mail) because the paper suggests that its authors have measured something traveling faster than the speed of light. Unfortunately, the claim is worse than weak; it is silly. I'll talk about why that is after briefly discussing their research.

The paper in question has no data at all so; although it asserts that it has measured superluminal velocities, it offers nothing to back that up. It also has very little in the way of experimental detail, so we can't determine with certainty what they are measuring, making it very difficult to evaluate their claims. We'll take as close a look as we can, given these limitations. (continued i the link below...)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-think-so.html

It was a nice tune while it lasted though. But now we no longer have to feel small and insignificant.

[rinselberg]

Thanks ksquared.

I don't think that "debunking" (see ksquared's post; one back) from Ars Technica "laserboy" Chris Lee is likely to put an end to the public discourse that has been attending these "faster than light" experiments, such as the one that Night Train brought to our attention here at the very top.

For the record, here's something I lifted from the report that I cited (previously) in DailyTech:

Dr. Aephraim Steinberg, from the University of Toronto, disagrees with the [German] findings. He says it's all just a matter of interpretation. The "wave packet" of the virtual photon exceeded the speed of light, but no actual information was transmitted that fast. Therefore, according to Steinberg, Einstein's "cosmic speed limit" remains safe ...

The DailyTech report continues with:

Nimtz and Stahlhofen may be the first scientists to create a macro-scale experiment. [Meaning an experiment with a one-meter length transmission barrier.] In a statement published shortly after [their] paper was announced, Nimitz claims, "For the time being, this is the only violation [of special relativity] that I know of ..."

So it seems that what is in dispute is not the experimental findings, per se, but the significance of the experimental findings. Does this experiment confirm that quantum physics is beyond the domain of Special Relativity, because Special Relativity limits are demonstrably contradicted by observable events at the quantum level? Or is the experiment inconclusive in this regard, because the results, when properly interpreted, are not in conflict with Special Relativity ..?

I think there's a likelihood of other researchers using the Nimtz-Stahlhofen experiment as a baseline, and trying to improve upon its design, in an effort to forward the discourse about whether there is or is not a fundamental "disconnect" between quantum physics and Special Relativity.