Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f58dcb6907f8.jpg[/atsimg]

Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.

Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really the case, Singleton said.

Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light.

The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists, Singleton said.

"Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves in pulses, but what we don't know is why these pulses are so bright or why they travel such long distances," Singleton said. "What we think is these are transmitting the same way our machine does."

And beyond explaining what has been a bit of a mystery to the astronomical community, Singleton's discovery could have wide-ranging technological impacts in areas such as medicine and communications, he said.

"Because nobody's really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field," Singleton said.

One possible use for the resulting speedy radio waves — which are packed into a very powerful wave the size of a pencil point — could be the creation of a new generation of cell phones that communicate directly to satellites, rather than transmitting through relay towers as they now do.

Those phones would have more reliable service and would also be more difficult for hackers to intercept, Singleton said.

Another application could be in very targeted chemotherapy, where a patient takes the drugs, and the radio waves are used to activate them very specifically in the area around a tumor, he said.

If Einstein were still alive, he probably wouldn't be all that surprised by the discovery, Perez said, even if it does seem on the surface to conflict with some of his theories.

"He might have thought, 'why did this take so long,' " Perez said.

current.com...

So, faster than light speed is now proven to be 100% possible and another old theory squashed!

Which other old theory will be the next to fall?





ps. Article is dated on current.com as June 29, 2009, but it has previously been published on 1/18/2008 here. tx DaddyBare

[edit on 30-6-2009 by warrenb]

Excellent post! I remember reading about scientists making light actually speed up a long time ago... I might have to dig that article up. I don't think light is the speed limit for all things in the universe.. I mean it's a pretty common particle/wave but that doesn't make it king ya know?

S&F for you sir

Here we go.. faster than light internet, TV, phone calls.. that would free up a load of materials.. and imagine the communication issues we could have in the search for ET?

You could contain the details of this model so as to ensure a speedy reply

Great find..

Could even go as far as teleportation too.. seeing as information travels on radio waves.. could be on the surface of Mars in milliseconds..

Which makes me think of an odd question.. if you were broken down into information particles and riding a 'faster than light' radio wave, would you need food and water or sleep if you were on a journey to another Galaxy?

I like the point made here, too. Radio waves, like electricity, are a waveform phenomena. They exist because of the *actions* of particles, but not *as* the particles themselves. There is nothing in Einstein's theories that says that no part of the universe can go faster than the speed of light. In fact, it has been postulated that the fabric of spacetime is itself expanding faster than light.

What is interesting about this is that it brings up the possibility of FTL communications. Imagine being able to encode a video signal in an FTL radio signal. It would be like a form of time travel... At the very least, we can get a few mins warning on a solar flare.

Good find. S&F for ya.

reply to post by Extralien


I am only postulating, since I have no direct experience with being converted into a radio signal and beamed across space. I would expect that while you are in this form, you would be "stateless", meaning that you cease to progress through time in your physical form. What your spiritual form or energy form experiences is open for speculation.

reply to post by warrenb


Interesting warrenb!

This draws an eerie parallel to Paul LaViolette's work on Pulsars. He believes they may be manipulated to serve as galactic 'beacons' that are used for interstellar communications/warnings etc.

According to LaViolette, pulsars are not naturally occurring objects, but rather, they represent an intelligent design. One intended for timekeeping, navigation and which serves as a faster-than-light warning system for events called galactic superwaves. At best, these superwaves are an annoyance to industrialized societies. At worst, they can and do trigger extinction level events (ELE). LaViolette tells that there have already been numerous ELE cataclysms on Earth and that our planet is now moving into the cross-hairs of yet another.

Source: yowusa.com...

IRM

[edit on 30/6/09 by InfaRedMan]

So does this mean that radio communications between any future manned mission to mars will be able to communicate faster than the current "45 minute" window it would currently take for the signal to get from there to here, and vise-versa?

Just think of the scientific advancement if we could talk to the mars rovers in real time!

the bigger question that comes to mind is, can standard radio's receive this same signal

like seti, scanning the skys for radio waves... so what if they are using this ftl radio wave.. could they be broadcasting it now, but were not listening

I hate to tell you this but I posted this very same story last year 1-4-2008
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Still a cool story right? makes me wonder how far they've come in a year too

What does this mean for science?

I thought our best understanding was that "nothing is faster than the speed of light"?

Originally posted by MichaelMysteries
What does this mean for science?

I thought our best understanding was that "nothing is faster than the speed of light"?

in a nutshell, it means "time to go back to the drawing board"

FTL ? Not so fast , I'm sorry

That article is written by a very very less educated person probably for 5 year old audience and people are jumping to conclusions. In other words this is called "sensational hype to sell some boring news".

A more straight forward article is here :
www.lanl.gov...

This explains that nothing is moving faster than light, he is only firing the radio pulses very fast through an array of antenna, so that all pulses seem to arrive at once at the receiver. It does produce some nice effects but its not FTL.....

Originally posted by rocksolidbrain
FTL ? Not so fast , I'm sorry

That article is written by a very very less educated person probably for 5 year old audience and people are jumping to conclusions. In other words this is called "sensational hype to sell some boring news".

A more straight forward article is here :
www.lanl.gov...

This explains that nothing is moving faster than light, he is only firing the radio pulses very fast through an array of antenna, so that all pulses seem to arrive at once at the receiver. It does produce some nice effects but its not FTL.....

Your link clearly even states that it is FASTER THAN LIGHT

John Singleton of Los Alamos and his collaborators have built a radio transmitter that incorporates a radio wave source that moves superluminally (faster than light). The emitted waves have several unusual properties. For example, they lose much less power over a distance than do ordinary radio waves; thus, they show promise for long-distance, low-power broadcasting applications.

superluminally = FTL

The amplifiers can be triggered in such a way that this source moves the length of the transmitter faster than the speed of light.

[edit on 30-6-2009 by warrenb]

Very good post.

This will bring out the thinking scientist and what I call the Book scientist.

The thinking scientist will look at this with an open mind. The Book scientist will reject this out of hand because they can't think past anything that they read in books and learned in a class.

I often said that science should stop using the words "it's impossible" because we are a type 0 civilization that sill doesn't know alot about the universe.

You will always here Book scientist saying no, no, no to everything. Just think of all the questions out there:

What constitutes dark energy/matter?
Does dark energy/matter exist?
Do we live in a parallel universe?
Is the universe holographic or a simulation?
Is the universe a quantum computer?

I can go on and on so I'm glad to see Thinking scientist pushing the envelope but I think Book scientist will be like the Pharisees and the Sadducees of science and it will be hard for them to accept this or anything that outside what they were taught in class.

reply to post by warrenb

Faster Than The Speed Of Light?
NEW YORK, July 19, 2000

(AP) Scientists have apparently broken the universe's speed limit.

For generations, physicists believed there is nothing faster than light moving through a vacuum -- a speed of 186,000 miles per second.

But in an experiment in Princeton, N.J., physicists sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering.

The pulse traveled 310 times the distance it would have covered if the chamber had contained a vacuum.

Researchers say it is the most convincing demonstration yet that the speed of light -- supposedly an ironclad rule of nature -- can be pushed beyond known boundaries, at least under certain laboratory circumstances.

Source : cbsNews.com

Later work ( sorry I don't have the cite handy ) has demonstrated that a pulse of light reflects off the far end of the cesium chamber before it even enters it !

Clearly Einstein's work advanced human knowledge only a step or two beyond where Newton left us on a ladder which rises much higher than any of us can imagine ...

A few references for those interested in more info -

1. Negative group velocity of a light pulse in cesium vapour ( High falootin scientific article ... )
2. Cesium-Vapor-Faster-Than-Light ( ScribD d'loadable document )