Placing my bet on the old patent clerk.
You can go faster than the speed of light. The fact light can’t catch up with the speed of matter is not my problem.
Oh crap. Am I going to have to set my clocks back?
fascinating
That’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking all along.
“....creates a gravitational potential between the pair of ‘virtual’ particles.”
While having to pack for a bit longer trip to Alpha Centauri, I wonder if the real discovery doesn’t have something to do with being able to create an anti-gravity device.
Stephen Hawking theorized that virtual particle-antiparticle pairs could spontaneously appear just outside the event horizon of a black hole, permitting one of the pair to enter the black hole and the other to escape, thus allowing matter to effectively escape from the black hole. The uncertainty principle permits otherwise impermissible things to happen as long as they don't require too much mass-energy or last too long.
It does seem to me conceivable that a photon moving through space could possibly undergo a similar transition, subject to the same uncertainty limitations. Conservation of mass-energy and momentum could perhaps insure that the photon which results at the end of the transition would have the same momentum (that is, direction) as the original photon. Whether the observed speed of the photon would be reduced is a question beyond my ability to conjecture.
The linked article suggests a delay of 4.7 hours over a path which takes 168,000 years to cover. I calculate that that is a discrepancy of roughly 3 parts per billion. That sounds to me like a pretty large error to have escaped observation given the great accuracy of time measurements possible today.
What do the guys from The Big Bang Theory (except Howard) have to say about this?
It's actually not, I think, contrary to what 'God' points to. There was a time when to even say His name at all - to utter it or even to conceive it - was a spiritual mistake ('sin' when it means, as it originally did, 'to miss the mark,' since all 'name and form' occupy time and space.) It wasn't that God occupied ALL time and space, or that all time and space was within the bounds of God, it's that there really is no time, nor space, yet: what is, is. Or: "It is only, it is."
That is why, I think we will see all the Quantum work approach, but never touch, the same roadblock Einstein never touched, but approached -> Like a cleat on a sailboat, the more progress you make pulling the rope through, the tighter the cleat, until the clamp force becomes infinite before the rope is through.
It's also why the universe only appears to manifest when observed. Because that is only when it manifests. Particles only take position when paired with attention.
When St. Augustine said "Whatever is exposed to the light, itself becomes the light." ... This light was not the 'light' we think of as in a flash light, nor the 'Light of God' we may conceive-> it was 'awareness.' (Many would argue that IS the light of God - awareness itself.)
So, no distance, no speed, because no space, no time ... and the appearance of the universe only as a phenomena with neither subject nor object. No witness, nothing to witness.
Not sure that will get Obama impeached this week.
That's been bouncing around my head for a couple years, and I guess this post on Einstein made it finally bounce out.
Absurd over-sensationalistic headline. I guess if 20th century physics were arising in a context of 21st century journalistic sensationalism, we’d be treated to headlines like “Newton Wrong Speed of Light Finite!” and the like.
Everyone reasonably conversant in physics knows that both general relativity and quantum mechanics must both be “wrong” in the sense of being only approximately correct, since the real theory of physics must be both relativistic and quantum mechanical, and general relativity is a classical theory, while we are only able to do the calculations of quantum mechanics in a non-relativistic background.
I wonder how much of the anomalies the speculative surmises of “dark matter” and “dark energy” are supposed to address can be fixed just by quantum corrections to general relativity. Beyond the massive neutrinos there may be no mysterious “dark matter” at all, ditto for “dark energy” since we still need what Einstein meant by a “grand unified theory” incorporating both gravity and the other forces in one description. And a description which must be quantum mechanical. It you want an “Einstein was wrong” headline, the really important basis for one came a while ago when it was confirmed that physical reality violates Bell’s Inequalities, and therefore cannot be describe by a classical local hidden variable theory of the sort Einstein thought should underlie and replace quantum mechanics.
Beware of the super-genius Einstein created by media as opposed to the real Einstein who occasionally made conceptual errors like everybody else.
Great. Now I have to start worrying about how close those black holes are all over again.
Well ever try beating it into bed from the wall switch
The debate is over. This is settled science. The deniers should be jailed.
Maybe the light stopped off for a Light.
We see matter going faster than the speed of light every day. When Obama has a new scandal, Republicans hide under their desks, crawl into a fetal position while sucking their thumbs at 187,000 miles per second.
Gee, didn’t a “consensus” of scientists agree that Einstein was correct...the science is settled. Anyone who disagrees is an Einstein “denier”. This is how “climate science” works so why not apply it here?