Light goes backwards

[5614]

Physicists have long been able to slow down and speed up light using different techniques. Now researchers have been able to make light travel backwards.

 

Boyd (a professor of optics) said "Through experiments we were able to see that the pulse inside the fiber was actually moving backward... In this case, as with all fast-light experiments, no information is truly moving faster than light". The findings were published in the May 12 issue of Science.

 

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060512_lightfrm.htm

[SmallIsPower]

Does this backwards light have special properties, or is it a parlar trick? If I remmeber second semester physics correctly, light is a packet of an electrical occialation at a right angle with a magnetic occilation, does reversing this (ie changing a 90^o to a 270^o angle) change anything?

[GutZ]

It also says:

 

"As if to defy common sense, they say, the backward-moving pulse of light travels faster than light."

[mooeypoo]

How can anything travel faster than light?

 

And then again.. if light travels quicker than light, it is no longer quicker.. than itself..

bah. This is confusing.

 

~moo

[swansont]

Relativity does not say "nothing can travel faster than light." The backward pulse does not violate causality; the information has already reached past where it is, as evidenced by the forward pulse that is further away.