'We have broken speed of light'

[nabraxas]

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.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say 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 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences.

For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.

The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.

Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/08/2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtm...scispeed116.xml

[Ace]

 

Surely this isnt legit?? That is pretty sweet if so! I might have to find a bit more info... Thanks for posting Nabraxas

 

[Amulte]

Its about time. ive had many discussions about the speed of light. some people adhear to the theory nothing can move faster than the speed of light, but ive always thought its more along the lines that we simply have not discovered anything faster or been able to harness/manipulate such forces.

only recently dark matter moved from fiction to fact. Quantum Physics, when the human race masters it, will highlight all the errors in other aspects of science. Theories are often taken as fact if they exist for prolonged time without challange, it going to be interesting to see what happens with this discovery.

[Auxin]

In 200 years quantum theory and einsteinian physics will rank right up there with the doctrine of signatures and the phlogiston theory.

Einstein calculated in the speed of light as a constant from all points of reference without a shred of proof and only because it was the dogma of the day, if he wanted his theories accepted he either had to disprove it or use it and he didnt have the technology to disprove it. The idea that moving at the speed of light effects time is an even more blatant mistake... in most instances it relates back not to complex math but to the example given that if your in a train moving away from a clock at the speed of light the clock will appear to have stopped... this relates to you catching up with the light reflected off the clock, not time.

Its said that the measure of a scientists greatness is how long he impedes progress in his own field. By all accounts Einstein was a very, very great scientist.

I have a uneasy feeling down in my gut that the universe will turn out to be hideously newtonian. No warp drive, no hyperspace travel, no worm holes, no spice fueled spacing guild bending space with psychic energy... the hell of sci-fi dreamers where humanity will live and die in one tiny corner of the milky way.

[devance]

I have a uneasy feeling down in my gut that the universe will turn out to be hideously newtonian. No warp drive, no hyperspace travel, no worm holes, no spice fueled spacing guild bending space with psychic energy... the hell of sci-fi dreamers where humanity will live and die in one tiny corner of the milky way.

------------------------------------

Well put.

I think the laws of physics as Newtonian, Ein and Quantum don't support space travel.

A very hostile environment.

'humanity will live and die in one tiny corner of the milky way'

True, physically but not the end of the story.

Life in another more real physics other than the three mentioned.

Understood personally, but only after decorporization.

But behold, not so a religious mythical myth perhaps.

The dead[decorporizad] are assumed to be not active or more like they are asleep.

Thats only true for 1/3 third of the d eadbecause they were preditors as far as human on hunan .

Judgement day will come for them.

The entitys being partly angelic have no such limitations.

But the last day will happen for them too.

About a thousand years from now.

Its strange but a person could know all this and alot better and it can be helpful.

But theres been alot of historical people more knowlegable and didn't care, didn't get it or was ignorant and I so Iguess its matter of context of the historical situation

Like star wars really.

[woof woof woof]

heh,....... speed of light...... i think the mind can think outside the box.....

[devance]

Thinking outside the box takes objectivity which means multitasking as primary.

M.Ds are selected for being able to in critical situations and astronauts so that the way to go.

One can't do so by a lack of information.

Politicals with insider word smithing doesn't make it.

[apothecary]

This phenomena has been observed before I think, under the term "field emission" but that is an a much denser and highly electronic charged area such as semi and superconducting in computers, flash memory (i.e. usb sticks!) etcetera.

What makes this claim interesting is the 3ft apart thing.

Fckin quantum mechanists always put my head in a twist.

[mec]

The idea that moving at the speed of light effects time is an even more blatant mistake... in most instances it relates back not to complex math but to the example given that if your in a train moving away from a clock at the speed of light the clock will appear to have stopped... this relates to you catching up with the light reflected off the clock, not time.

If we travel from point A too point B on the planet in a jet plane, time actually slows down, for the passenger, its been proven. By a couple of fractions of/or whole seconds (not sure by how much). And it relates too the speed the plane flys. Einstein used lots of examples too help people wrap their heads around his ideas. I think of it as a physical relationship not just a relative way of looking or an arbitrary mathematical relationship.

Edited August 17, 2007 by mec

[devance]

Certainly such physic are true.

A mathematical scientist has a theoritical lens to see more provable results.

Very true but other types of physic are not provable as to observable phenomenon and not likely to be taken seriously because the sensors are not as yet invented and the bright people can't think in a factual vacumm.

Doesn't mean reproducible phenomenon can't occur, just not the physics of it is not considered or the sensors invented yet to do so.

Most people know about haullcenogic symbolism.

Nothing wrong with that as some objectivity from social propaganda.

But theres alot more to reality than that.

[naja naja]

Pffft, I did that ages ago

[mu!]

Hmmm, I wonder what new fucked up weapons will come about into existence due to this new found discovery.

Cant wait!

[devance]

I saw a movie called ' the last days of atlantis'

About 30 years ago.

In the movie giant lasers starting to blast the atlantian evil people into skeletons.

A soothing prospect when compared 1 and1/2 hour mirved atomic missle.

I would take Putin up on his offer of joint soviet radar sites.

I'f not too late.

In which case some soothing ointment of trust might help the Russians.

[Aya]

If we travel from point A too point B on the planet in a jet plane, time actually slows down, for the passenger, its been proven. By a couple of fractions of/or whole seconds (not sure by how much). And it relates too the speed the plane flys. Einstein used lots of examples too help people wrap their heads around his ideas. I think of it as a physical relationship not just a relative way of looking or an arbitrary mathematical relationship.

How has it been proven? The only test to prove this in my mind would be if two watches were set to the exact same time, one stayed at point A and one was taken on board the plane to point B and then the two were compared afterwards. Was this the test?

To me time just seems to be a subjective mental tool to give reference and to help put existence and our daily lives in to perspective, not a natural law which is the scientific given.

The second was defined by how long it took for a certain particle to get from A to B, they did this a few hundred times, then found the mean. They made the instrument to measure it, then they refined the instrument by what they found.

It's a man made referential system as far as i can see, i'd like to be able to see it from the other perspective though.

Refutes?

[apothecary]

Depends on your definition if refute.

There is a little or a lot I could say but the best thing for anyone to do is simply read "A Brief History of Time".

Essentially it is a man made referential system, but that doesn't necessarily make it incorrect, when you consider the 'particle' in your example can be a 'light particle' don't get me started on waves vs particles and two slit experiment and shenanigans.

[No_One]

Einstein alluded to there being more to reality than what our senses pick up, I reckon he only shared what he had to/could prove - my guess is that these lads have discovered an attribute/aspect of reality our world/society-toughened bodies don't sense or uptill now haven't been able to prove.

I can't remember where I read it now but someone once said that in the future we'll all have the ability to pick up on the same subtle energies that psychics, profilers, mentalists, etc, pick up on/can sense, now they have the apparatus to prove there's something more "out-there" it could be the thing that begins the melt-down of contemporary science/western thinking towards the "supernatural". If science can prove it's existence than maybe more people would belive in it enough to try to gain some sort of useful control/mastery over it.

Peace

[trucha]

Whether that claim holds true or not, there is no reason to think that all of our cherished notions that we understand reality can someday be shown to be either wrong or only partially correct. If there does not turn out to be exceptions to this then interstellar travel will never be a reality for humans.

It was only a hundred or so years ago that one would have been laughed at for suggesting masturbation was not the primary source of mental illness

[ramon]

How has it been proven? The only test to prove this in my mind would be if two watches were set to the exact same time, one stayed at point A and one was taken on board the plane to point B and then the two were compared afterwards. Was this the test?

Two atomic clocks where used.

I assume the most accurate at the time.

I think the best proof of time dilation is the subatomic particles created in bubble chambers.

For whatever reasons their life span ( shall we say ) is known and tested and when they are created in bubble chambers moving at great speeds they actually stay in existence longer in correspondance to time dilation predictions.

I don't see any great changes to what we knew before in the experiment.

It seems to me to be a great illustration of the uncertainty principle.

As the time frame was instantaneuos then it seems to me the particle could have come out at infinte speed.

[devance]

A new type of physics is isn't new but means that we aren't animals.

For a example the biblical histroy of the siege of Jerecho.

Time was applied in a local locallity rather then The Sun actually stopped.

[mark80]

The notion of breaking the speed of light isn't at all new. Theoretical physics have long preposed the existence of Tachyon. They always go faster then the speed of light but consequently have an imaginary mass (square root of a negative number. The beautiful thing about theorticial physics is that many physcissts (more or less glorified mathematicinas) invent nature out of there heads instead of looking at the nature around them and analysing it.

“The idea that moving at the speed of light effects time is an even more blatant mistake... in most instances it relates back not to complex math but to the example given that if your in a train moving away from a clock at the speed of light the clock will appear to have stopped... this relates to you catching up with the light reflected off the clock, not time.”

Actually I am sure there is a formula which has shown that time correlates directly with speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

Your example only looks at one observer looking at 1 clock. When you can use 2 clocks and quantify it mathematically.

“have a uneasy feeling down in my gut that the universe will turn out to be hideously newtonian. No warp drive, no hyperspace travel, no worm holes, no spice fueled spacing guild bending space with psychic energy... the hell of sci-fi dreamers where humanity will live and die in one tiny corner of the milky way. “

I disagree Newtonian physicis does not ghive rise to already provern natural phenomnea such as black holes and time dilation.

Back to go faster then the speed of light it has already been shown to be true just look at Cherenkov radiation which shown to be true for astronauts.

There experiemnt could simply be there equipment was not accurate enough to measure the time it took to go form one chamber to another or they detected another particle.

[ramon]

“The idea that moving at the speed of light effects time is an even more blatant mistake... in most instances it relates back not to complex math but to the example given that if your in a train moving away from a clock at the speed of light the clock will appear to have stopped... this relates to you catching up with the light reflected off the clock, not time.”

Actually I am sure there is a formula which has shown that time correlates directly with speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

This confuses me.

The first paragraph seems to be suggesting you don't believe in time dilation due to speed and the second statement suggest you do.

[mark80]

This confuses me.

The first paragraph seems to be suggesting you don't believe in time dilation due to speed and the second statement suggest you do.

the first parargraph is a quote from auxin. The second ios my comment oin his paragraph.

[No_One]

there is no reason to think that all of our cherished notions that we understand reality can someday be shown to be either wrong or only partially correct. If there does not turn out to be exceptions to this then interstellar travel will never be a reality for humans.

It was only a hundred or so years ago that one would have been laughed at for suggesting masturbation was not the primary source of mental illness

Science is primarily concerned/constructed with the common loci of the atomic level i.e. shit our eyes can see, our skin/nerves can touch, our ears can pick up, science has given us a pretty decent level of mastery over this domain and our physical-bodies/person can use science to survive pretty easily.

We now know there are sub-atomic dimensions to reality, we know they're there but we haven't mastered them yet.

Einstein (Hawkins aswell) reached a point at the end of his education where he withdrew and thought about the validity of what the system was or others were telling him, he sifted through the shit, kept the good bits and then asked himself what he was experiencing - the result was the THEORY of relativity.

Einstein didn't learn to speak till late suggesting to me he was hypersensitive to something others aren't, he also made it clear that imagination is more important than knowledge, a hypersensitivity to the subtle energies of the universe and an imagination powerful enough to see how those energies fit into the scheme of things added to a solid-grasp of the language of science IMO is probably what allowed him to do what he did.

We don't need to fight tooth and nail at the atomic level to survive anymore, as this becomes more common i.e. more people use their minds to survive and not their bodies, our bodies won't need to be so tough and I reckon our seat of awareness/sensitivity will shift allowing our brains the chance to understand and hence master the energies of sub-atomic dimensions.

I also reckon "spooky force at a distance" will end up being telepathy.

I think the best proof of time dilation is the subatomic particles created in bubble chambers.

I think the best proof of time dilation is the subatomic particles created in bubble chambers.

For whatever reasons their life span ( shall we say ) is known and tested and when they are created in bubble chambers moving at great speeds they actually stay in existence longer in correspondance to time dilation predictions.

What about when psychoactives push your seat of consciousness deep inside or stimulants push it out?

FOAF finds his sense of time gets out of synch with his watches sense of time when he ingests ;)

Peace

[ballzac]

In 200 years quantum theory and einsteinian physics will rank right up there with the doctrine of signatures and the phlogiston theory.

Einstein calculated in the speed of light as a constant from all points of reference without a shred of proof and only because it was the dogma of the day, if he wanted his theories accepted he either had to disprove it or use it and he didnt have the technology to disprove it. The idea that moving at the speed of light effects time is an even more blatant mistake... in most instances it relates back not to complex math but to the example given that if your in a train moving away from a clock at the speed of light the clock will appear to have stopped... this relates to you catching up with the light reflected off the clock, not time.

Its said that the measure of a scientists greatness is how long he impedes progress in his own field. By all accounts Einstein was a very, very great scientist.

I have a uneasy feeling down in my gut that the universe will turn out to be hideously newtonian. No warp drive, no hyperspace travel, no worm holes, no spice fueled spacing guild bending space with psychic energy... the hell of sci-fi dreamers where humanity will live and die in one tiny corner of the milky way.

Actually, James Clerk Maxwell came to the conclusion that light must travel at a specific, constant speed through his equations of electromagnetism. Physicists did not know what this speed must be in relation to, so they invented the idea of an 'aether' that is a universal reference frame. A couple of fellas called Michelson and Morley decided to prove that the aether exists by using an interferometer to measure the difference between speeds of light traveling in different directions relative to the aether. Much to their disappointment, they found that the speed of light is always exactly the same, no matter what the speed of the source or the detector.

There were lots of ideas thrown around, like contraction of matter due to motion through the aether, or aether being dragged along with the motion of the earth. But they were all clumsy hypotheses and couldn't explain every problem. Then Einstein came along with the idea of time dilation and length contraction due to RELATIVE motion. It took a while for these ideas to become accepted, but the conclusions that Einstein came to are inescapable.

What you are referring to when you talk about catching up with light reflected off the clock is actually called abberation (EDIT: Actually, I guess this effect is really Doppler, as you are reffering only to observed differences in time intervals, not appearance of form), and is not the same as time dilation. A clock traveling away from you at high speed will APPEAR to slow down, and one traveling towards you will appear to speed up. But time dilation is different.

If a spacecraft has a clock that uses a photon bouncing up and down between two mirrors, lets say one metre apart, the light is traveling at speed c, and we measure the time between two consecutive instances of the photon hitting the bottom mirror as the distance between the mirrors divided by the speed of light. When the spaceship moves away from us at high speed, we see the photon follow a different path. Think of a line joining the two mirrors, and a line depicting the direction of motion, as sides A and B of a right-triangle respectively. On board the spaceship, the occupants still see the photon travel path A, but we actually see it follow the hyptenuse of the triangle. However, because we see the light traveling at the same speed c, we actually measure a longer time interval between the two events.

The effects of time-dilation are thoroughly proven. In fact, without taking time dilation into account, we could not use GPS, because at the speed that the satellites travel, the effect of time dilation is quite measurable. The results of Einsteinian relativity are well documented and well established. I mean, the hydrogen bomb was developed using principles that arose from general relativity. Do you think that Einstein just made up a lot of bullshit and then by some amazing fluke when people put together a heap of uranium it exploded, due to some unrelated principle? Is it just a fluke that when two atomic clocks are synchronized and one is flown at high speed, one clock has slowed down when it returns by exactly the amount predicted by einstein?

Honestly, I don't know why you would make the comments you made without the slightest understanding, scientific or historical, of relativity. I mean, you stated as fact, things that are just completely untrue.

Edited August 19, 2007 by ballzac

[ballzac]

Here is an animation depicting the explanation of time dilation that I used:

Note that both observers see each other's clock moving more slowly than their own, but this is not just a trick. If the spaceships slowed down and landed on the asteroid, the clock onboard the spaceships would be behind the one on the asteroid. This is because this effect is only valid in a reference frame that is not accelerating, so we can only accept that the spaceships' clocks have slowed down, and not the one on the asteroid.

And here is a good explanation of why Maxwell's equations predict an invariant speed of propagation of electromagnetic waves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYVmUzac44Q

Oh yeah also, there is nothing in Einsteinian relativity that says nothing can travel faster than light. The implication of the theory is that no information can be transmitted faster than the invariant speed, c. Light does not always travel at c. As it travels through a transparent substance, it appears to slow down, but information can still be transmitted through this substance faster than the speed of light through said substance.

Needless to say, any reports of anything traveling faster than c are bullshit. If you understand the theory, then it is apparent that traveling faster than c is as logically impossible as designing a round square. This does not rule out short cuts like wormholes etc., but nothing can travel THROUGH SPACE faster than this speed. Although I should mention that tachyons (theoretical particles that travel faster than c) are not ruled out, but they would be incapable of traveling slower than c as their velocity would approach c in the same asymptotic fashion that ordinary matter does.

Edited August 19, 2007 by ballzac