'We have broken speed of light'

Telegraph ^ | 8/16/07 | Nick Fleming

[LibWhacker]

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."

[Red Badger]

Bean Bag?.......Yeah some people believe photons travel in groups or packets........like illegals in pick-up trucks.........

[ari-freedom]

I don’t even know why we are debating something we only know from a Telegraph article.

[InterceptPoint]

3ft at a rate of 186,000+ miles per second....

They can measure a time of 0.000000003 seconds accurately?

That's about a foot per nanosecond or 3 nanoseconds total. That's a pretty easy measurement these days. After all you are probably running a 3 GHz computer. That means one clock cycle on your computer is about a third of a nanosecond.

[Alamo-Girl]

LOLOL!

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

To go faster than light, you just jump a ride in the 5th dimension where time stands still, then pop back here when you get to where you were going. Trouble with all this is that you get to where you are going before you hopped the ride, and therefore forget why you went in the first place, or even that you had gone at all.

This really happens to me.. OFTEN.

I walk into a room and can't remember why.

[r9etb]

Sort of hard to believe that they could measure so accurately at 3 feet.

I think the primary error source would be due to timing the arrival of the pulses.

With modern frequency standards, you can get timing to fractions of a nanosecond, which corresponds to distances of a lot less than 3 feet. For a properly calibrated system, the "error regions" around each detector would not overlap, and you should be able to detect the phenomenon in question, if it occurs.

Or ... you could measure the speed of light.

[70times7]

'We have broken speed of light'

Well you darn well better fix it. I have a lot to do and I'm not doing it in the dark.

[Al Gator]

“I don’t even know why we are debating something we only know from a Telegraph article.”

The answer is a slam dunk.

Its because all the geeks and eggheads can crawl out of the woodwork and trot out their book learning to impress all the chicks!

cmon now, that was too easy.....

[in hoc signo vinces]

Here you go pancake bunny...

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257

[McGruff]

I’m no rocket scientist but, how do you measure something that’s going 186,000 miles between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart?

[Al Gator]

“I walk into a room and can’t remember why.”

See! I KNEW I wasn’t the only one! Now I just have to tell those guys in the white coats that I finally found a witness. Don’t go anywhere.

[CHEE]

I wonder if these researchers thought to calibrate their Timex stopwatch prior to running this experiment.

[FReepaholic]

"We canna go any faster or she'll blow!"

[HoustonTech]

Do photons have mass?

I don't think so. They're Protestant.

[Lurking Libertarian]

Ping.

[jeddavis]

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

If the rest of relativity isn't any better than that, then it (relativity) belongs in the landfill of dead science theories along with evolution.

[r9etb]

Let’s say the photons are like marbles in a pipe that is full from end to end. You push one marble in one end, and a marble pops out the other end. The marble didn’t travel, it just took up a place that made another marble leave its place. Einstein’s speed limit is secure...........

Well, no. In order for your thought experiment to explain this result, the pressure from your finger would have to propagate through the string of intervening marbles, to the last marble, faster than light speed. And since neither marbles nor any other real substances are incompressible, I think you'd run into relativity troubles at the atomic level.

Applying your analogy to a string of photons, you're basically saying that the amplitude perturbation (which affects the wave properties of light) somehow travels faster than the photon particles.

I don't think the analogy works.

[MeanWestTexan]

Pfft... I have no time for smugglers who drop their shipments at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser.

[Frank_2001]

Nonsense! Muhammad Ali was the first to break the speed of light. He said he was so fast that he would flip off the light switch in his hotel room and be in bed before it got dark!;)

[HenpeckedCon]

They scoffed too when Orville Wright invented his brother Wilbur!