No, they didn’t.
Wow, I should have checked Eureka Alert a while ago. Here’s a reasonable explanation of what happened. It was indeed tunneling, and it also does not violate SR. As is typical with science reporting, the reporter seized upon the most fantastic interpretation of the results, and not the sober analysis presented at the end. We did not break the speed of light, end of story.
As a scientist working in a highly publicized field, I know this feeling all too well. It’s hard to sell sombre and factual science just as it is night impossible to sell simple facts and necessities in politics.
Everything has to be blown up to catch the publics eye. Luckily most of us read beyond the headline and realize the far less existing, but actual, story.
But you must admit, would have been cool if we had broken the speed of sound. Einsteins General and Special Relatively would have to be thrown out the window.
And that is why you don’t write posts at 1am. I meant to say speed of light, not speed of sound :D.
I believe that these very same headline writers were involved in writing the dialogue for Paramount Pictures’, The Big Bus (1976).
“Scotty: The aerodynamics work! He’s breaking wind at 90!”
Nope, no speed of light breakage. We’d have probably heard that eh? ~:D First thing I thought of when I saw that was cold fusion.
They didn’t invent levitation the other day either. They created a -theory- of how to reverse the Cassimir effect at the nanoscale. Which is damn cool, but it ain’t anti-gravity.
Thank God for the Internet.
Hell yeah it’d be cool Roland. I wished it was true but knew it probably wasn’t.
However, these guys made photons tunnel 3 feet. That’s still pretty frickin’ cool. I love stuff like that.
Wanna know what else is cool, boys’n squirrels? Marvel released their Doctor Strange movie last week. !!! Go git one!
Not again. I’ve ranted about this subject professionally for a decades, but some people just don’t realize that the group velocity is not the causally-limited speed spoken of in relativity. The group velocity frequently (not always – depends on the system) loses physical meaning (as a velocity) for highly dispersive systems (mathematically, it’s a first-order attempt to treat dispersion). The one in the article was such a system.
You cannot encode information to travel faster than the vacuum speed of light, c. The proper velocity to measue in such systems is the information velocity, and this is a much more tedious (and expensive) measurement to make (it takes internet test & measurement gear).
How much are these quacks asking for in funding? Is there some way they can connect this light experimenting with global warming?
Thanks, Tenebris for today’s installment of “Physics For Knuckledraggers”
tenebris – I am presuming you are defining ‘matter’ as ‘information’ – which is, in my view, entirely accurate. Matter/mass is ‘organized energy’, ie, ‘information’.
Never mind the speed of gossip dispersed on the internet.
Further to the group velocity idea:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/ns-lst081607.php
I think this article from 2002 explains it all.
http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/28606
phantom – isn’t the situation the difference between energy that has been transformed to mass, in which case, it must operate according to the constraint of ‘c’, the speed of light in a vacuum.. and pure energy, which is not mass (and doesn’t exist per se in our universe because our entire universe operates according to ‘c’).
Matter, in our experience, behaves according to linear Newtonian time..tick, tick. But, there is a hypothesis about non-Newtonian time ( Matsuno, Koichiro, 1998, a Japanese bioengineer) which suggests THREE modes of time. One of these is ‘progressive time’..which refers to imaginary or virtual ‘matter’ rather than actual matter.
Impossible to explain in this thread, but, virtual or imaginary energy is not mass, is not subject to the rule of ‘c’. It doesn’t exist in ‘perfect’ or ‘Newtonian’ time but in ‘progressive time’ and non-local space; and we only experience it when it is transformed by ‘c’ into mass, into particles. Can one break this temporal and spatial constraint, and transform mass to aspatial and atemporal energy? Hmmm.
ET –The short answer is “no” – matter is not information, when one employs rigorous definitions of energy and information. A long answer would involve discussing your paper, and my email to you is overdue.
Phantom – your relinking of the eureka article has Steinberg from U of T beautifully explaining the group velocity thing (he’s talking pulse reshaping and energy loss and avoiding the phrase “Brillouin precursors” ). It gets a little more complicated in systems where no apparent pulse reshaping happens, and where amplification occurs, but the effect is the same.
Cal2 – the cern article has its problems, but if I start yammering on about arguments between Bohr and Einstein, nonlinear quantum mechanics, etc, I’ll strain Kate’s patience. Let’s just say this is all speculation, and leave it at that.
Occupational hazard, Kate. Do I need my callused knuckles rapped?
this is a cool alternative two. gravity equations almost fall out of this theory.
http://www2.rideau.net/gaasbeek/spap1.html
helical particle waves
All of a sudden I feel really stupid 🙁
Lets talk talk about bad liberals
I say SDA has the smartest people
“All of a sudden I feel really stupid 🙁
Lets talk talk about bad liberals
I say SDA has the smartest people”
[Posted by: Spencer at August 17, 2007 10:40 PM]
The average liberal makes my dog look really, really smart. She even used differential equations to calculate the probable size of Al Gore’s carbon footprint. Then she peed on it.
Smart, eh?
ET, I am but a lowly bone cracker who reads too much sci-fi, and keeps up with the press releases on things like this. I can think about the ideas, but I can’t do the math. 🙁
However I’ve been wondering if there might be a way to cheat in this case.
If we use this tunneling approach to the “group velocity” we get one or two photons split off at the front of the wave packet arriving ahead of the rest. If we can ascertain that they arrive (which it seems we can), can we not by prior agreement decide that the arrival of a tunneling photon is information in and of itself?
If a photon is a “1” and no photon is a “0”, tunneling a photon gives you a head start even if you have to send the rest of the pulse along “later” at the speed of light.
This would be breaking the information light speed rule for a special case.
Possibly this is disproved by the math, yes?
WE HAVE BROKE WARP 10 or INFENANT VILOCITY