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Light Exceeds Its Own Speed Limit, or Does It?
Published: May 30, 2000 Author: JAMES GLANZ
Posted on 05/30/2000 09:13:11 PDT by H.R. Gross
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3933e89738c3.htm

Will the speed of light always be a barrier?
Air and Space Magaine. Vol # 1 March 1978 | March 1978
Editorial Staff w/ Melvin B. Zistein
Posted on 06/12/2005 6:00:55 PM PDT by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1421630/posts

An oldie addition to an old topic of yours. :')

At the Speed of Light
by Tim Folger
DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 4 (April 2003)
Webb used data collected by the world's most powerful telescope -- the Keck, perched on the summit of Mauna Kea, 13,796 feet up on the Big Island of Hawaii. He looked at light from 68 quasars -- extremely bright young galaxies -- as much as 12 billion light-years from Earth. During the light's long journey to Earth, it passed through clouds of intergalactic gas. In doing so, the light's spectra changed, depending on the chemical elements in the clouds.

The details of such spectral shifts are expressed mathematically by the so-called fine-structure constant, which consists of four components, including the speed of light. The constant should remain the same no matter where or when it's measured -- that's why it's called a constant. But Webb found otherwise. In the intergalactic clouds, the "constant" was smaller than the expected value by one part in 100,000. This means one or more elements of the fine-structure constant -- possibly the speed of light -- must have varied by the same amount. If light did travel that much faster 12 billion years ago, when it left the remotest quasars Webb studied, it would be consistent with Magueijo's theory. The difference may seem tiny, but it floored physicists around the world, including its discoverer. "I was absolutely stunned, yeah," Webb says. "I certainly didn't expect it."

...According to Magueijo's calculations, the speed of light near a cosmic string would increase dramatically: A spaceship traveling on one of these fast tracks could go well above the standard speed of light—186,282 miles per second—while still traveling at a fraction of the accelerated light-speed limit around the cosmic string. The laws of special relativity would still hold—time would slow down for the travelers. But because they would be traveling at a fraction of the cosmic string's light-speed limit, the effect would be minimized; astronauts could travel to the stars and return to Earth to find that months, not centuries, had passed.

Non Rocket Scientist Question: "How hot does it have to be for water to burn?"

I was wondering what would be the results of a laser producing a super-hot beam on water, which is made up of hydrogen and oxygen... Which burns rather well.

Let's say a stream of good old water (or steam) was squirted into a rocket combustion chamber and was hit by a million (or more!) degree laser beam...

Would we have a very efficent conversion of h2o to thrust?

Or what?

Any comments?