'We have broken speed of light'

Uh, huh. And the paper on this breakthrough was published where? The Weekly World News?
 
3 ft = 0.9144 meters

c = 299,792,458 m/sec

.9144 / 299792458 = 3 nanoseconds.

I'm sure it SEEMED instantaneous, but unless they've got some data that shows it arrived at the other prism in less than 3 nanoseconds, I'm gonna have some doubts.
 
I'd like to see a LOT more than the tidbit presented here. I can't believe it's not released along with publication in a major science journal.
 
email Kath, on this board. I'm sure she's knowledgeable.....a bona fide physicist.
 
Photons are massless. F=ma. Acceleration of photons to any speed requires no force, and there is no mass change with acceleration (as there is with objects of mass), so I'm not entirely sure what these guys have accomplished. In any event, the real questions will be first, about their system of measurement to determine that the photons actually moved from one place to the other "instantaneously" (as noted by wbarnhill above, the time to travel 3 feet at 186,000 miles per second is rather short to begin with) and in that regard, the name "Heisenberg" comes to mind, and second, whether it has any bearing on objects with mass.
 
my understanding about the heisenberg uncertainy principle is that you simply cannon accurately measure position and speed at the same time. one or the other. i dont remember mass coming into the picture at all.

kath will set us all straight though. my physics education is not very much past freshman year in college.
 
The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.
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Quantum tunneling doesn't break any laws. And as everyone else notes, these were photons. The article is worthless. I'd be interested to read a real article by a knowledgeable author about this. Instantaneous communication has been demonstrated using "quantum entanglement", I think.
 
Well, it's hard to judge something scientifically, from an article with pretty much no content, but... it sounds like junior-level college QM to me. Don't throw away your GPS's yet.

Quantum tunnelling is a well-known phenomenon that physics majors all calculate early in their careers. A photon, says the theory, is not really a "particle" at all like a little bullet, it is a "smeared-out probability function" called a wavefunction. QM is all about calculating the shape of this wavefunction and how it changes as the particle propagates through space and time. Tunnelling is a classic intro problem: Suppose you fire a photon from the left at an impassible barrier (an infinitely-high potential wall). You can compute the probability-smear: it has a big peak on the left side of the barrier (where you'd expect), is zero inside the barrier, and has a small but non-zero tail on the "impossible" side of the barrier.

Now, when you (or a physicist) put your eye (or a detector) into the space to "see" where the photon is, what is "seen" is only one possible value, chosen from the probability-smear. This is called the "collapse of the wavefunction". So you are most likely to observe the photon on the left, where it belongs, but there is a non-zero probability of observing it on the "impossible" side of the wall. Fire many many photons at the wall, an a few of them will magically make it to the other side.

After they are measured, the wavefunction no longer exists, only the one value measured. Like, after you roll some dice and get a three, there is no longer ANY probability of rolling a seven. The collapse of the wavefunction happens INSTANTANEOUSLY, which leads to all sorts of apparently-faster-than-light kinds of scenarios, like the one discussed in this article. They are NOT violations of special relativity. The wavefunction is a spread-out object, whereas the post-collapse photon is localized. The train analogy from the second article is a good one.

(In college, I heard a funny story about some famous physicist who, drunk one night, decided to tunnel through the wall of his dorm room by repeatedly smashing his body against it. His roommates, after much failed persuasion, eventually got him to stop by pointing out that it was far MORE likely that he'd tunnel halfway through the wall.)

Anyway... remember that your GPS's rely on many many corrections from general relativity, so if GR is wrong than airplanes will end up littering the hillsides...

--Kath

Edit: another example of "apparent" faster-than-light travel is this: suppose you're standing at the center of a planetarium dome that is a billion light-years in radius. You shine your hand-held flashlight at one wall, and then over 10 seconds, sweep the beam to the other wall. The image spot appears to move at billions of light-years per second! However, INFORMATION cannot be transmitted from place to place faster than light. Your beam carries information from you to the wall (which will take a billion years), but the image spot on the wall carries no information from point A to point B.
 
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kath said:
Well, it's hard to judge something scientifically, from an article with pretty much no content, but... it sounds like junior-level college QM to me. Don't throw away your GPS's yet.

Quantum tunnelling is a well-known phenomenon that physics majors all calculate early in their careers. A photon, says the theory, is not really a "particle" at all like a little bullet, it is a "smeared-out probability function" called a wavefunction....
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Lets cut to the chase Kath, are you telling me I won't be able to get a warp core for a 172 next year?
 
kath said:
Tunnelling is a classic intro problem: Suppose you fire a photon from the left at an impassible barrier
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No wonder Kirk liked those photon torpedos, they go right through.

I remember my one QM class as being one of the more interesitng physics classes...
 
Ghery said:
I think that's what she's saying.

Now, if we could just get the transporter working... :D
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Seriously, I don't care about faster-than-light travel. Give me speed-of-light travel and I'll be perfectly content.
 
wbarnhill said:
Seriously, I don't care about faster-than-light travel. Give me speed-of-light travel and I'll be perfectly content.
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Not me, I full and instantaneous space/time travel. I want to bend space time around to meet me at the front door, and I want to walk through into the point of space/time that I want to be at. Kath, get on that for me would you?
 
Henning said:
Not me, I full and instantaneous space/time travel. I want to bend space time around to meet me at the front door, and I want to walk through into the point of space/time that I want to be at. Kath, get on that for me would you?
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Chuck Norris knows the secret.
 
wbarnhill said:
3 ft = 0.9144 meters

c = 299,792,458 m/sec

.9144 / 299792458 = 3 nanoseconds.

I'm sure it SEEMED instantaneous, but unless they've got some data that shows it arrived at the other prism in less than 3 nanoseconds, I'm gonna have some doubts.
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186,000 miles per second - it's not just a good idea, it's the Law. B)
 
Dart said:
186,000 miles per second - it's not just a good idea, it's the Law. B)
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Mork: "I got a ticket for doing the speed of light in a speed of sound zone.


I would have stopped earlier but I couldn't see the lights and I couldn't hear the sirens."
 
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Henning said:
Not me, I full and instantaneous space/time travel. I want to bend space time around to meet me at the front door, and I want to walk through into the point of space/time that I want to be at. Kath, get on that for me would you?
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Henning... just realign the plasma inverters, and divert main power to the main deflector dish of your 172, and you should be good to go. Works on the 150 pretty well. Not sure if it'll work on a Mooney, though... do they even have plasma inverters?
:D:D

--Kath
 
kath said:
Henning... just realign the plasma inverters, and divert main power to the main deflector dish of your 172, and you should be good to go. Works on the 150 pretty well. Not sure if it'll work on a Mooney, though... do they even have plasma inverters?
:D:D

--Kath
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Whatever you do, don't scan the anomaly with a tachyon beam.
 
mikea said:
Mork: "I got a ticket for doing the speed of light in a speed of sound zone.


I would have stopped earlier but I couldn't see the lights and I couldn't hear the sirens."
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:rofl: thats funnier than hell mike. everyone at work is looking at me funny...
 
kath said:
Henning... just realign the plasma inverters, and divert main power to the main deflector dish of your 172, and you should be good to go. Works on the 150 pretty well. Not sure if it'll work on a Mooney, though... do they even have plasma inverters?
:D:D

--Kath
Click to expand...
The leading edge of the vertical stabilizer makes them unsuitable.



:D
 
mikea said:
Mork: "I got a ticket for doing the speed of light in a speed of sound zone.
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"What do you mean I ran a red light? It was green when I went through it. Yea yea yea I know it was doppler shifted from red to green but the rule is if you see red you stop, green you go. It was green so what's your problem?"

"Aww shazbot. A $100 light ticket turned into 1 cents per mph over 35. This is going to be spendy."


On the original subject: I read something about 2-3 years ago about the faster than light thing. It was almost the same type setup from what the source reported this time around. I actually expected the date on the link to be the same as the one I saw then.
 
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tonycondon said:
my understanding about the heisenberg uncertainy principle is that you simply cannon accurately measure position and speed at the same time. one or the other. i dont remember mass coming into the picture at all.

kath will set us all straight though. my physics education is not very much past freshman year in college.
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That is why the Heisenberg compensators were invented.
 
I will very much like to see the paper and then follow up peer reviewed research on this one. Tunneling still may not violate the General Theory of Relativity as it only gives the appearance of fast than light travel to an observer while the object only experienced relativistic speeds.
 
I'm willing to wait for a test to see if these gents are right before passing judgment. No offense to Kath (I love ya, Kath, I really do), but I think we, as a society, currently have Physics wrong.

We make up too much stuff to prove what we currently have. Some examples (remember, I'm no physicist, so be gentle):

Matter/Energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. Unless it disappears as friction, which cannot be measured (unless you measure it by the amount of energy/matter that disappeared). Circular logic that proves our current physics system.

Black Holes may or may not exist, but if they do (which many physicists currently believe), then a blackhole is taking on large amounts of mass and energy, but not getting measurably bigger...why? Because it compacts it so tightly in a way that can only be measured by measuring the disappearance of mass/energy around it.

Distant objects in space are apparantly all moving away from us, which is observable by measuring the red/blue shift of objects in space. This means a "big bang theory" is most likely correct. But in order for this to be true, we'd need to be able to measure which objects are moving closer to us, no? And we can't do that since everything is moving away.

According to the Uncertainty Principle, it is impossible to get an accurate measurement of any object, because measuring its position affects its speed, and measuring its speed affects its position. Seems fishy to me that we cannot measure something accurately, yet we can determine that certain speeds cannot be breached. In relation to the thread directly, the speed of light cannot be breached, because according to Einstein (I believe), the amount of energy needed to continue to accellerate as you get closer to the speed of light grows exponentially. How can this be measured accurately?

I don't have the correct answers to these questions, these are just musings I have when I study this stuff. This is what makes me think we are no closer today than we were when we believed that rocks returned to the earth when dropped because they were made of earth, rain fell because it returned to the ocean (where it came from), etc.

Kath, if you're not too busy, can you explain some of these things to me? I'd be curious to get the answer from a real physicist.
 
kath said:
Henning... just realign the plasma inverters, and divert main power to the main deflector dish of your 172, and you should be good to go. Works on the 150 pretty well. Not sure if it'll work on a Mooney, though... do they even have plasma inverters?
:D:D

--Kath
Click to expand...

Sigh, just call me when you have it ready, I haven't got time to piddle around with the plasma inverter just now... I'll even cook you a nice steak dinner when you warp on by with it.
 
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kath said:
Anyway... remember that your GPS's rely on many many corrections from general relativity, so if GR is wrong than airplanes will end up littering the hillsides...

--Kath
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I would not go that far. We know that Newtonian mechanics is not the real answer of how things work thanks to GR. Yet we still use the Newtonian descriptions for certain, narrowly defined environments. So even if GR is found to not be complete or displaced by something in the future there is still a good chance that parts of it are applicable to the scenarios that we have employed it for.
 
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smigaldi said:
I would not go that far. We know that Newtonian mechanics is not the real answer of how things work thanks to GR. Yet we still use the Newtonian descriptions for certain, narrowly defined environments. So even if GR is found to not be complete or displaced by something in the future there is still a good chance that parts of it are applicable to the scenarios that we have employed it for.
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Newtonian physics has served, and is serving, quite well to describe the world surrounding the everyday lives of humans. Remember Apollo 13? However modern cosmology was indeed born with Einstein's two great works. And someday relativity will be supplanted by an even more complete understanding of the nature of the Universe. But even then, Newton will still be with us. Shoulders of giants and all that.
 
Here's the paper (I think). It's not in any refereed journal that I can tell, nor can I find any citations to it, or peer review:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/0708.0681


Nick... yikes! Your questions are the kind that should be discussed over a good beer!
Here's the cliff notes version, though...

Energy "lost" from friction CAN be measured. The energy goes into heating up the environment (making molecules move faster), and can be measured as a change in temperature, as in a calorimeter. (Measure the temp of a glass of water, then stir it, and the temp goes up. Just a tiny bit, but measureable, Joule first did this.) Not circular reasoning at all.

Black Holes do get more massive as they "eat" stuff. And yes we can measure how massive a Black Hole is (by the orbits of things around it). We can't measure its physical size, because that is inside the event horizon. Doesn't mean it isn't getting bigger in there.

The Hubble law: (speed that things are moving away) = (a constant) * (how far away they are).
The explanation for this is that the entire universe is expanding. If true, nothing should be moving closer to us.
Of course, for nearby objects, the speed that they move away is very small, and can be overwhelmed by local effects, so nearby objects can be "blueshifted" rather than "redshifted". The Hubble law only kicks in measurably for stuff at very far away (or "cosmological") distances.

The Uncertainty Principle doesn't say that *everything* in the universe is uncertain, just our measurement of a particlar property for a particular single particle. Constants of nature (like the speed of light, Planck's Constant, etc.) are measured very accurately, using many many particles. The Uncertainty Principle is a very precise statement actually, derived from a very precise theory. (Difficult to explain without more beer.)

In short, I believe in basic modern physics. QM and relativity have been around for 100 years, and are both extremely well-tested theories. Dark energy, on the other hand... jury is still out... :D

--Kath
 
kath said:
Here's the paper (I think). It's not in any refereed journal that I can tell, nor can I find any citations to it, or peer review:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/0708.0681


Nick... yikes! Your questions are the kind that should be discussed over a good beer!
Here's the cliff notes version, though...

In short, I believe in basic modern physics. QM and relativity have been around for 100 years, and are both extremely well-tested theories. Dark energy, on the other hand... jury is still out... :D

--Kath
Click to expand...

Uhhhhh, Kath....If you leave Alaska, does your brain overheat??:confused: :dunno:

Now how about you warp me over a cold beer...
 
Gosh, I didn't realize my posting of that link would lead to a black hole! :eek:

So, Chicken Little had nothing to fear. The sky can't fall. It's moving further away. So, as the sky moves away and the universe expands so do our minds and ability.

Now, the "Air Guitar Competition" is beginning to make sense. :yes:
 
kath said:
Here's the paper (I think). It's not in any refereed journal that I can tell, nor can I find any citations to it, or peer review:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/0708.0681


Nick... yikes! Your questions are the kind that should be discussed over a good beer!
Here's the cliff notes version, though...

Energy "lost" from friction CAN be measured. The energy goes into heating up the environment (making molecules move faster), and can be measured as a change in temperature, as in a calorimeter. (Measure the temp of a glass of water, then stir it, and the temp goes up. Just a tiny bit, but measureable, Joule first did this.) Not circular reasoning at all.

Black Holes do get more massive as they "eat" stuff. And yes we can measure how massive a Black Hole is (by the orbits of things around it). We can't measure its physical size, because that is inside the event horizon. Doesn't mean it isn't getting bigger in there.

The Hubble law: (speed that things are moving away) = (a constant) * (how far away they are).
The explanation for this is that the entire universe is expanding. If true, nothing should be moving closer to us.
Of course, for nearby objects, the speed that they move away is very small, and can be overwhelmed by local effects, so nearby objects can be "blueshifted" rather than "redshifted". The Hubble law only kicks in measurably for stuff at very far away (or "cosmological") distances.

The Uncertainty Principle doesn't say that *everything* in the universe is uncertain, just our measurement of a particlar property for a particular single particle. Constants of nature (like the speed of light, Planck's Constant, etc.) are measured very accurately, using many many particles. The Uncertainty Principle is a very precise statement actually, derived from a very precise theory. (Difficult to explain without more beer.)

In short, I believe in basic modern physics. QM and relativity have been around for 100 years, and are both extremely well-tested theories. Dark energy, on the other hand... jury is still out... :D

--Kath
Click to expand...

Thank you. And I would love the opportunity to have a few beers and talk physics with you. Would make my day!
 
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