Signals Exceed The Speed Of Light

It seems we have broken the ultimate speed limit. The NEC research institute in Princeton can send a signal up to 300 times their normal velocity of 186,000 miles per second. I wonder if time travel or some type of "warp drive" will be possible in the future?

Here is the link.www.lightparty.com...

[Edited on 15-2-2004 by kinglizard]

If they have truly broken the speed of light, it would be all over the news by now.

So, since it isn't, I doubt it.

I have found some seemingly trustworthy sources.This is one www.newscientist.com..., also a program on the Discovery Channel said it was first done somewhere in Germany, although I can't seem to find a link online.

if only we could makes spaceships that go that fast...

It says in the article, scientists have been doing it for about two decades, no matter this is not famous now.

yeah but people don't get it. You don't have to travel faster than the speed of light if you truly understand how the universe works.

No physical object of information goes faster than light in these experiments. A pulse in the light brightness goes faster than light. That is the same as claiming that the dot of a laser aimed at the moon goes faster than light. The dot itself is not a physical object and therefore not bound by the speed of light.

Originally posted by amantine
No physical object of information goes faster than light in these experiments. A pulse in the light brightness goes faster than light. That is the same as claiming that the dot of a laser aimed at the moon goes faster than light. The dot itself is not a physical object and therefore not bound by the speed of light.

No, not just light but information!

"Koeln physics professor Guenther Nimtz, used a hollow metal pipe, called a wave transducer. On the end of the Ca. 20 cm long metal pipe a section of Mozart's Symphony #40 became audible through an amplifier. Not digital quality, but good enough for radio. There was a speed change of the waves that were transduced. This tunnel effect was 4.7 x C [c = speed of light]. The lengths of the microwaves that Nimtz chose were actually too wide for the wave transducer. But still some of them found their way through the other side to the amplifier. In the tunnel occurrence the waves do not seem to require any time. Whereas outside the tunnel the waves were well behaving enough to follow the classical laws and travel at the speed of light. Mozart's symphony has information content, Nimtz contends."



Such an almost unbelievable news item, herein without a date, however was based on actual accepted research. Here I quote Dr. Raymond Chiao's brief summary of these experiments:

"Other experiments confirming the superluminality of tunnelling have been performed in Cologne, Florence, and Vienna [14, 15, 16]. The Cologne and Florence groups performed microwave experiments, and the Vienna group performed a femtosecond laser experiment. All these groups have confirmed the Hartman effect. One of these groups [17] has claimed to have sent Mozart's 40th symphony at a speed of 4:7c through a microwave tunnel barrier 114 mm long consisting of a periodic dielectric structure similar to our dielectric mirror."

www.soulinvitation.com...

They have managed to accelerate light several thousand times faster than its 'regular' speed, c,
There is a way to do it, I cant remember it off the top of my head..

They've been doing it for AGES..... The light, theoretically, ends up where it was going before it ever left.

Originally posted by browha
They have managed to accelerate light several thousand times faster than its 'regular' speed, c,
There is a way to do it, I cant remember it off the top of my head..

They've been doing it for AGES..... The light, theoretically, ends up where it was going before it ever left.

Yes quantum physics.

This link explains the theory.
Does Bell's Inequality Principle rule out local theories of quantum mechanics?

physics.about.com...

Originally posted by amantine
That is the same as claiming that the dot of a laser aimed at the moon goes faster than light. The dot itself is not a physical object and therefore not bound by the speed of light.

Well, the dot is light, so it should be bound by the speed of light.

Originally posted by kinglizard
Well, the dot is light, so it should be bound by the speed of light.

No, the dot is a projection of light. Imagine a laser aimed at the moon. Move the laser to the side. The dot appears to be moving faster than light on the moon. No information or physical objects actually move faster than light. The light still goes with c. More abou this: here.

No, not just light but information!

.

Sorry, I though we were talking about phase and group velocity. I remember reading about that Nimtz experiment. The article said that no actual information was send faster than light. These experiments are really interesting. This is a more skeptical article.

This is about a year old.

And he never published in Nature.

Last I heard the identified a possible artifact causing the "jump".

If you find anything current, please post it however. I do know that the experiment had been confirmed by at least one other physicist though.

Originally posted by Quest
If you find anything current, please post it however. I do know that the experiment had been confirmed by at least one other physicist though.

Quest,

Tha best information I can find is on this site

I will continue my search an post anything relevant.

[Edited on 9-3-2004 by kinglizard]

It's like if you had a hose full of marbles. When you push a marble in one end, one falls out the other end. It's not the same marble. The signal is sent instantly but, the particle moves at it's normal speed.

Well Intel has created a processor that moves at light speed. Thats something else.

Checkout this article.

Quantum ComSat May Send Mail Faster Than Light Speed.

Hotly contested by Einstein in his later years, the strangest property of a photon may be its ability to communicate faster than its own speed -- the speed of light. Scientists can create so-called "entangled photon pairs" that have the peculiar ability to instantaneously influence one another no matter how far apart they are.

So we are talking about sending information faster than light speed, not just photons.

Here's an article on the topic from a reliable source. This is kinda old news I remember hearing it on the news when it happened;

news.bbc.co.uk...

If matter is to go faster than the speed of light, logic would say it becomes invisible. I doubt any size-worthy object will ever go faster than the speed of light.