Posted on 06/28/2014 12:14:35 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The University of Maryland physicist believes the delay could have been because the light was in fact slowed as it travelled due to something known as 'vacuum polarisation'.
During this phenomenon, photons break down to something known as ‘positrons’ and electrons for a split second. before combining together again.
When they split, quantum mechanics creates a gravitational potential between the pair of ‘virtual’ particles.
Dr Franson argues that the process might have a gradual impact on the speed of the photon, meaning that over 168,000 light years, the photons may have suffered a near five-hour delay.
If the physicist is correct, it means scientists have to recalculate everything from our distance to the sun to some of the most distant objects seen in other galaxies.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Franson, how DARE you!!! The speed of light is SETTLED SCIENCE and therefore not subject to questioning.
Thank you.
Einstein didn't measure the speed of light. He wasn't an experimental physicist. He was a theoretical physicist. Theoretical physicists don't make contraptions to measure things.
No problem. You just have to fill the room with dark matter first.
Well now you just ruined everything.
I regularly use the phrase, ‘so long, and thanks for all the fish’.
Bookmark.
Dear Retards,
Dark matter is matter traveling faster than the speed of light.
I mean holy shit monkey children, you can’t figure out the moment matter accelerates beyond the speed of light it become undetectable “dark” matter.
Yes, I’m right. Yes, this is the first time this has been proposed in the history of man kind. For me, it was either Slurpee at 7/11 or solving the greatest mystery of physics.
Eddie01
Bump on that!
Does this article imply that radio frequency propagation speed can be faster than light because photon speed can vary below its assumed “C” constant?
The actual velocity of one particular guage boson in free space is a happy accident and a convenient way to measure c, but “c” is much deeper than that. It’s a structural constant of spacetime, and whatever its value happens to be, spacetime will behave as the appropriate field equations require with that value of “c” subsituted in for the lorentz tranformations etc. What actual photons do is largely irrelevant since einstein’s field equations would still be true if there was no charge and hence no EM fields to give rise to photons in the first place.
Well said. Measuring the actual speed of light to “prove Einstein wrong” is like claiming a new paint job on your car invalidates Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Thanks for setting us straight!
This is crap. Look at the sun, the photons that are made in the core do not enter the “surface” at once, they are bumping into other particles and the time it takes for them to make the journey to the “surface” and leave the sun is for some of them several million years! The neutrinos have a very weak interaction and thus appears to travel much faster.
Note, the speed of light is the same in vacuum, just what the good old doctor ordered.
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