Posted on 08/17/2007 8:19:28 AM PDT by poiuqwer
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."
We need The Doctor.
If they ‘transmit’ a sequence of faster than light photons with differing frequencies, why wouldn’t that sequence be preserved at the receiving end?
I read that 2 minutes ago and I’m still laughing. Awesome!
Of course if everybody gets to doing that, it'll change the Earth as it was fictionally--and only in one alternate history--changed by the Borg takeover in Star Trek: First Contact.
What's that mosquito-like buzzing in my ear? Oh, no! It's starting!
HF
All Your Photons Are Belong to Us
Not to mention her prism to mirror jump to acquire a residence (they couldn’t afford) and become a ‘concerned’ senator for the people of the state of NY.
It’s Bushes fault, Rove took the light speed limiter with him when he left. lol
In elliptic geometry, the sum of the angles of a triangle tends to be greater than 180.
In hyperbolic geometry, the sum of the angles of a triangle tends to be less than 180.
Because of the presence of a "-1" in the Minkowski metric, relativistic spacetime tends to be hyperbolic in nature.
179.999- degrees. 180 degrees is a straight line.
I know.
I read this before it was posted.
Correct me if Im wrong but the taking infinite energy thing requires mass to be part of the equation and photons have no mass. This seems to be much more related to quantum mechanics than relativity..
I often listen to coast to coast (kook to kook), as it comes on for me at 7 AM, when I am waking up.
One morning they did have a reasonable NASA guy, a good old boy from Huntsville.
Unlike, the ET kooks, this guy gave very good logical explanations about future space travel.
Baring the unknown, worm holes or whatever, he said it could be possible to travel AT the speed of light, but pointed out that hitting something as small as a grain of sand at that speed would have the force of numerous nuclear bombs going off at the same time ( I forget the number).
Beam me up Scotty.
Usually these apparent paradoxes are resolved by using a [quantum] wave formulation of the particle - it's possible that the leading edge of the wave could get there faster than the speed of light, but to balance things out, there would necessarily have to be a trailing edge of the wave which got there slower than the speed of light.
Lately, the big question has been: Is there any way you could embed a piece of information [something like a binary "0" or "1"] in the leading edge of the wave so that that information could arrive and be understood "coherently" before the trailing edge of the wave catches up and cancels out whatever information you thought you had received in the leading edge.
That ideal is kinda the ne plus ultra these days, but no one seems to have been able to do it yet.
I'm sure, however, that it would cause toenail warts, and contribute to next week's impending galactic disaster.
A takeoff on one of the most asinine statements libs use against Pres. Bush.
I did business with a very bright businessman for about 15 yrs.
We never talked politics but one day about 3 yrs. ago the subject came up.
He actually told me “Bush lied, people died”.
Our relationship ended right there.
I couldn’t believe someone as intelligent as him could say that ridiculous slogan.
On a more serious note, I remember reading some months ago that scientist observed atoms( may have been particles) separated by some distance reacting to a disturbance induced to only one of the atoms/particles.
Our understanding of matter and physics may very well be turned on its head in coming years.
If you get into a glass chamber make sure there are no flies in it.
ROFL
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