Scientists break speed of light

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I can't remember if I heard about them doing it or trying to do it.
This was a fair while ago so maybe it was just trying to do it.
Still
I like totally heard about it:cool:
 
Wow!!

At the moment that's the only word I seem to be able to utter.

Not being a scientist I can't comprehend the potential applications that this would lead to. I'm still wondering if it's really true. Do you think it really is possible?

I really wish they had placed more importance on science when I was in high school. Oh well.

Thanks for the info Nebula.

Cheers
Teri
:)
 
This statement is important to always remember and I quote the source document:

"The scientific statement "nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light" is an entirely different belief, one that has yet to be proven wrong. The NEC experiment caused a pulse of light, a group of waves with no mass, to go faster than light."

That's the important thing, that only light can travel faster than light , nothing else. So what does this say.....only that we cannot build any type of vessel that will ever reach the speed of light with the physics we now know.
 
Now how did they do that?
I can't figure out how it worked...

And by the way, this threat should have been in Science cathegory.
 
hmmm...this news is no news !

my physics-teacher told us about such experiment in school ............... and i left school in 1998 :rolleyes:
really ,the part about something coming OUT a tube before it was IN the tube is old .....

hey folks ,scientists can even beam today :cool:
 
Then really it's just light going faster than we originally thought, so nothing new has been achieved.


Cheers
Teri
 
Originally posted by Teri
Then really it's just light going faster than we originally thought, so nothing new has been achieved.


Cheers
Teri
Click to expand...

No, it was a PATTERN that was superluminously traveling. The PHASE velocity of the light pulse was tweaked to travel faster then the GROUP velocity of the light pulse. Basically it was traveling along the pulses being sent through.
 
Excuse my stupidity, but if they accelerated light like that through a medium, like what I think they did, and then they sent it through a vacuum, would it go back to the regular speed of light, or would it go just as fast?

strategicman
 
I'm not too proud to admit that this has gone over my head. But to the people who do understand this, is it something or is it nothing? Has a breakthrough been made?

Sorry about my ignorance, but it never dampens my enthusiasm for the topic.

Cheers
Teri
:)
 
Its nice that they can send light waves faster than before...but can they send mass faster than light? that remains to be the unanswered question
 
Does this mean they'll be able to send information faster than before?
Radiowaves, for instance.
 
YES, provided you send them through a tweaked pipeline, not through the air, so it wouldn't exactly help for interplanetary communication, an interplanetary pipeline seems rather expensive :p but some niche could maybe be found in chip interconnection ?

Maybe nanotubes could be tweaked to make some kind of superluminous glassfibre cable, combine that with fast-tcp protocol and you could run a beowulf cluster spread over several continents as if it was sitting on the same motherboard.
 
No, you can't send information faster than light by this method; also the individual photons in this experiment did not go faster than light.

All they did was suprimpose a pattern onto a contiuous beam of light which moved up the beam faster than the light itself.

You can only do it by phasing the whole beam to have a travelling wave moving along it.
you need to know the state of the beam at the origin and destination; no information can be sent this way.
 
Originally posted by eburacum45
No, you can't send information faster than light by this method; also the individual photons in this experiment did not go faster than light.

All they did was suprimpose a pattern onto a contiuous beam of light which moved up the beam faster than the light itself.

You can only do it by phasing the whole beam to have a travelling wave moving along it.
you need to know the state of the beam at the origin and destination; no information can be sent this way.
Click to expand...

I said that earlier. Appearently some people don't like to read and hear what they want.
 
Yes you did, and I read your post, Blackholesun; thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

Mind you, none of the news reports made it clear what was actually going on; too much sensationalism over very little.

----------------------
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
 
Originally posted by eburacum45
Yes you did, and I read your post, Blackholesun; thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

Mind you, none of the news reports made it clear what was actually going on; too much sensationalism over very little.

----------------------
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Click to expand...

True...and I probably could have explained it a little better myself also. Your comment was much clearer....thanks :)
 
I Like Pencils
Does this mean they'll be able to send information faster than before?
Click to expand...

This is what I was thinking. I wonder if it's possible to calibrate the speed the light travels; for example if light travels x kilometers in n seconds, could we make it travel 2xKm in n seconds as well?

This would be great control over data transmission.
 
Originally posted by Nebula
I Like Pencils


This is what I was thinking. I wonder if it's possible to calibrate the speed the light travels; for example if light travels x kilometers in n seconds, could we make it travel 2xKm in n seconds as well?

This would be great control over data transmission.
Click to expand...

No. Information cannot be sent faster than light. And why? Effect before the cause Nebula, effect for the cause. Read Chagur's link.
 
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