Keyword: speedoflight
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An international team of scientists has recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light, a spokesman for the researchers said on Thursday -- in what could be a challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics. If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light.
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Scientists celebrated at the world's biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era in the quest for the secrets of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light. "This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we...
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WASHINGTON – Vitriol and invective stain American political history, but falsehoods, half-truths and innuendo now spread with the speed of light across partisan airwaves and the Internet — the din drowning out the country's moderate political center. Countless Internet blogs have taken on the administration of the first African-American president, claiming — falsely — that Barack Obama isn't an American citizen, is a secret Muslim, is a socialist, wants to establish death panels to decide when elderly Americans would no longer receive medical care and be allowed to die. The list is long. Most recently, a partisan furor blew up...
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The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right? Well, maybe not. Try and figure this out. Astronomers studying radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would overturn Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons should move at the speed of light. Uh oh Einstein. The discovery was made using the new MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, located on a mountain top on the Canary...
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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...
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Physicist Costas Soukoulis and his research group at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory on the Iowa State University campus are having the time of their lives making light travel backwards at negative speeds that appear faster than the speed of light. ~snip~ This backward-bending characteristic of metamaterials allows enhanced resolution in optical lenses, which could potentially lead to the development of a flat superlens with the power to see inside a human cell and diagnose disease in a baby still in the womb. ~snip~ In addition, Soukoulis and his University of Karlsruhe colleagues have also shown that both...
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Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past. ADVERTISEMENT "There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are."
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Researchers in Switzerland have succeeded in breaking the cosmic speed limit by getting light to go faster than, well, light. Or is it all an illusion? Scientists have recently succeeded in doing all sorts of fancy things with light, including slowing it down and even stopping it all together. Now a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland is controlling the speed of light using simple off-the-shelf optical fibers, without the aid of special media such as cold gases or crystalline solids like in other experiments. “This has the enormous advantage of being a simple, inexpensive...
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Galaxy Observations Show No Change In Fundamental Physical Constant The results are being reported today (Monday, April 18) at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) by astronomer Jeffrey Newman, a Hubble Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory representing DEEP2, a collaboration led by the University of California, Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz. Newman is presenting the data and an update on the DEEP2 project at a 1 p.m. EDT press conference at the Marriott Waterside Hotel in Tampa, Fla. The fine structure constant, one of a handful of pure numbers that occupy a central role in physics,...
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NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species. Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago. Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York,...
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SAN DIEGO -- If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second. But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible. For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or perform other leaps of cosmic logic.Fast forward a century. Astronomers are now measuring stuff -- material, matter, things --...
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The theory of evolution requires unfathomable lengths of time – eons ... billions and billions of years. Even with all that time, it's still hard to imagine how complex biochemicals such as hemoglobin or chlorophyll self assembled in the primordial goo. But to those of us who question the process, the answer is always the same. Time. More time than you can grasp – timespans so vast that anything is possible, even chance combinations of random chemicals to form the stunning complexities of reproducing life. Modern physics is now considering a theory that could throw into confusion virtually all of...
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In earlier articles, we discussed the nature of time and the fallacy of linear and absolute time concepts. We now know that time is a physical property and varies with respect to mass, acceleration, and gravity.1 Time is tied to our concepts of the curvature of space-time, and the velocity of light. The velocity of light is, in fact, a parameter which appears to affect almost every aspect of both cosmological physics on the large scale, as well as quantum physics in the particle scale. It is, of course, considered to be the fundamental constant of physics. Historical Perspective The...
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Scientists attempt to measure speed of gravity UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI NEWS RELEASE Posted: September 4, 2002 Ever since Albert Einstein proposed the general theory of relativity in 1916, physicists worldwide have tested the theory's underlying principles. Whil some principles - such as the speed of light is a constant - have been proven, others have enot. Now, through a combination of modern technology, the alignment of a unique group of celestial bodies on Sept. 8, and an experiment conceived by a University of Missouri-Columbia physicist, one more of those principles might soon be proven. "According to Einstein's theory, the...
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