Germans claim to break the speed of light

[Norman Albers]

Ditto. Now if one of you guys can go engineer a metamaterial with index of refraction less than unity, I'd really like to hear about it. I ran this by and I think Klaynos explained why I shouldn't hold my breath. [if only we could mix a region of 3/4 unit permittivty with a 1/4 sprinkling of metamaterial of index -1...]

[stormwarrior]

Because you might learn some physics?

 

The actual implications of relativity and causality are a little more involved than incorrectly thinking that you'll never get a number bigger than 3e8 m/s. That's the watered-down tabloid version of things.

 

 

So basically you are implicating that I know nothing of physics. The fact remains that scientists have shown reproducable proof that the speed of light barrier was surpassed.

 

You refute the claims with the steadfast "Nothing can go faster than light"

 

Yet, the proof is within the pudding. Why not open yourself to the new idea that Einstein's relativity might indeed be flawed and the things in which you have learned throughout your learnign process might need to be reconsidered altogether. Too hard to handle isnt it.

 

Well the earth isnt flat my friends and the fact that one scientist theorized it was indeed round changed everyones thought pattern. Outrage was the response.

 

Hold to old science if you will, but dont stand ignorant when proof is shown in light of what you know to be fact, be open minded and research to your own conclusion. I, personally like to think on the what if's and this indeed poses a big what if to everyone.

 

What if the world is round!?

[Norman Albers]

Dude, get a brain. Consider the following problem which applies in weather, and in exploding stars. Look at a circular wavefront impinging at high expansion speed, on a relatively flat surface. If you calculate the sideways spread of the position of contact, which at first is a point, at this first moment it is infinite. This is a phase velocity of the situation. It is not hard to write the equation of a circle and take the derivative. Do this. It describes slapping your face, or the impact of a flattened piano hammer which needs my work to file it round again with sandpaper. Thus I control the harmonics excited upon impact with the strings. I have more than 30 years experience in this sort of wave mechanics. There are series of astronomic photographs of supernova explosion shells impinging months or years later on regions of gas clouds. You will look at these and see a ring of contact spreading out at superluminal velocities. WOW!

[stormwarrior]

Dude, get a brain. Consider the following problem which applies in weather, and in exploding stars. Look at a circular wavefront impinging at high expansion speed, on a relatively flat surface. If you calculate the sideways spread of the position of contact, which at first is a point, at this first moment it is infinite. This is a phase velocity of the situation. It is not hard to write the equation of a circle and take the derivative. Do this. It describes slapping your face, or the impact of a flattened piano hammer which needs my work to file it round again with sandpaper. Thus I control the harmonics excited upon impact with the strings. I have more than 30 years experience in this sort of wave mechanics. There are series of astronomic photographs of supernova explosion shells impinging months or years later on regions of gas clouds. You will look at these and see a ring of contact spreading out at superluminal velocities. WOW!

 

 

Though your points are interesting, I fail to see the relation to the case at hand. If Light travels at 300,000 km and something travels at 300,001 km that surpasses the speef of light. Thus breaking what Einstein theorized in his relativity and special relativity.

 

Would you agree with that statement?

 

So the scientists tunneled a few photons faster then the speed of light. It is reproducable.

 

Do you agree with that statement?

 

now if the above are concrete which they appear to be then isnt it fair of me to say that the speed of light ,which is one of the cornerstones of relativity, needs to be discarded or ammended and things that rely on the unwavering speed of light can be better explained with this new piece of knowledge.

 

 

So basically dude my brian is intact and willing to be be like a reed within the wind bending instead of breaking.

 

I have several years working with wavelenghs and ionization as well as electricity and acid but that is regardless really as we are not in a pissing contest here are we?

[swansont]

So basically you are implicating that I know nothing of physics. The fact remains that scientists have shown reproducable proof that the speed of light barrier was surpassed.

 

No, I was implying that your knowledge in this area of physics was lacking, which it obviously is. But that's something that can be addressed.

 

You refute the claims with the steadfast "Nothing can go faster than light"

 

Quite the opposite. What I was saying is that that phrase is wrong. "Nothing can go faster than light" is a pop-science summary of relativity and causality, and it's not true. Lots of things happen faster than light, but they don't carry information, so causality is not violated.

 

Yet, the proof is within the pudding. Why not open yourself to the new idea that Einstein's relativity might indeed be flawed and the things in which you have learned throughout your learnign process might need to be reconsidered altogether. Too hard to handle isnt it.

 

 

On the contrary, I love learning new stuff. But this isn't the refutation of relativity you claim it is. It's a refutation of your strawman of relativity, and that's not the same thing.

[Norman Albers]

Stormwarrior, no I do not agree and I think you are sucked in by headlines. I am not afraid to challenge orthodoxy when mathematics I have completed gives me something important to say. Read Part III, Manifesto, in my photon paper. I do not, however, enter with trash talk like you do. I will demand that people answer as to the usefulness of the statements I hear the mathematics saying.

[stormwarrior]

That makes sense swansont.

Yes I agree I can learn more about this area of physics, as in phase velocity but I have do have a grasp of the theory of relativity. A grasp that can be inductive of learning and growing of this area.

 

When I read the headliner, I was at first drawn to the headline like a commericial but upon reading the experiment and understanding that in instances that were controlled and manipulated speeds faster then light occurred which were popularly thought to be unattainable by a few.

 

 

Norm...how was my question trash talk? Because I asked what it would mean to relativity if the speed was broken? That is not trash talk. It is questioning a conclusion.

 

Forgive me. In my excitement about the possibilities that are presented by proof of an object going faster then the speed of light, I tend to be overbearing and inpolite. It is a character flaw and in no way am I here to insult anyone with my questions.

 

 

So again I will ask my question.

 

What does this experiment mean to the the scientific community at hand. If an object goes faster then the speed of light is relativity broken?

 

Does the rear of the train actually get to the end of the tunnel before the head of the train?

[scalbers]

Is this mainly the idea of photons getting an extra tunneling ride on an evanescent wave past the surface where total internal reflection is taking place? If so, it could be represent going faster than light, though only a "one-time" shot ahead by a short distance - since evanescent waves die out over fairly short distances. This is still a table top distance since we're looking at microwaves. If this is the scenario are we violating special relativity any more than other tunneling phenomena might?

[Klaynos]

I think something has to be made clear here.

 

No object has gone faster than light.

 

It just appears that way, it's a trick of the experiment. Just a trick, the head line is DEEPLY missleading.

[Norman Albers]

Stormwarrior, thank you. Attitude and style really do matter. We are all learning things. Klaynos, right on as usual. scalbers is ahead of me in understanding.

[stormwarrior]

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22255966-2,00.html

August 17, 2007 01:00am

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IT was supposed to be the one speed limit you could not break.

 

But scientists claim to have demonstrated there is the possibility of travel faster than the speed of light.

 

The feat contradicts one of the key tenets of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity - that nothing, under any circumstances, can move faster than 300,000km a second, or the speed of light.

 

Travelling faster than light also, in theory, turns back time.

 

According to conventional physics, a person moving beyond light speed would arrive at his destination before leaving.

 

But two German physicists claim to have forced light to overcome its own speed limit using the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling.

 

Their experiments focused on the travel of microwave photons - energetic packets of light - through two prisms.

 

When the prisms were moved apart, most photons reflected off the first prism they encountered and were picked up by a detector.

 

But a few appeared to "tunnel" through a gap separating them as if the prisms were still held together.

 

Although these photons had travelled a longer distance, they arrived at their detector at the same time as the reflected photons.

 

This suggests the transit between the two prisms was faster than the speed of light.

 

Dr Gunter Nimtz, of the University of Koblenz, told the magazine New Scientist: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

 

 

Ok, now that we are all on the same page here.

 

How is this misleading? Seems pretty straight forward to me.

 

If the photons arrived at the same time as the others even though it went a longer distance wouldnt it be going faster? Yet these scientists say the detector recorded them arriving at the same instant.

If this is a trick its pretty convincing.

 

on another note, Im still stuck on the train in the tunnel. Laughing out loud.

 

Speculation: you need to read up on anomalous dispersion, and the difference between group velocity and phase velocity.

 

beating a dead horse here

 

group velocity

 

phase velocity

 

 

The above is thanks to wikipedia Easier to pull those images then to type it with a character map lol.

 

 

I wish I knew the exacts of the experiment. It seems to be promising. quantum tunneling who would have thought. Ill dig some more see if it is published

 

ok I found the experiement

 

On 5 August 2007, German physicists Dr Günter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen of The University of Koblenz and Landau published a paper entitled "Macroscopic violation of special relativity", in which they performed a closed and open-prism/Frustrated total internal reflection experiment; the latter being used to reproduce the case of quantum tunnelling through the presence of an air gap; both reflected and transmitted beams experienced a longitudinal shift in the plane of incidence, the Goos-Hänchen shift. [3]

 

The experiment conducted involved microwaves[3] of 32.8mm wavelength[3] measured by antennas of 350mm that moved parallel to the surface of the prism. They were passed through right-angled triangle perspex prisms of 0.4 x 0.4 m²[3] to illustrate the FTIR concept, and all measurements were used in adherence to macroscopic measurements for quantum mechanical experiments.[3] The beam was incident perpendicular to the first prism, and was reflected over the critical angle of the prism at 38.7o, at under 45o; the resulting measurements indicated that, the reflected and the transmitted rays both arrived at the detecting antennas at the same time, with the delay in reflection and transmission of the digital microwave pulse corresponding to the Goos-Hänchen shift along the perspex-air boundary, and the universal tunnelling time of 100ps.[3] Because both beams had arrived at the same time, despite the tunnelling that had occurred with one beam, the speed was suggested to have exceeded boundaries of special relativity[3] ; vis-a-vis the speed of light.

 

However, the incidence of tunnelling was also observed alongside possible photon evanescent modes, identified as virtual exchange particles by Nimtz in previous work[4] are initially unobservable following from the uncertainty relation, but that can be observed within a localized region of photons at limited distance from its exponential tail.[3]

 

more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunneling

[swansont]

Now go read the links I provided in post #3 and the ten posts that follow.

[Norman Albers]

After reading the first few references offered by Swansont. I am struck by the representation of Gaussian wave packets. I raise questions comparing these to my modelling, over in: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?p=357929#post357929

[stormwarrior]

I think norman abler is correct. Superlumial speeds were attained in the wave packet. because of the barrier that forces quantum tunneling.

But how doesnt this break special relativity? I see that the photons went faster then 300,000 km per second according to the sensors in the experiment, and even if it is just a brief reconfiguration of a phase the photon actually surpassed that speed. According to special relativity Under No circumstances will that speed be surpassed.

 

I read the links swanton and I was amazed that it has been the last 6-7 years that this has been questionable.

 

I also see the dilemna you were talking about Swanton and I think I understand better now but it still excites me that the speed was surpassed. Where does one go from here? Redefinition? I wonder how Einstein would explain this in SR and R.

[Norman Albers]

I'm hoping scalbers will post some stuff on evanescent waves.

[Klaynos]

I suspect that if you repeat the experiment using single photons you will find that causality holds.

[swansont]

I see that the photons went faster then 300,000 km per second according to the sensors in the experiment, and even if it is just a brief reconfiguration of a phase the photon actually surpassed that speed.

 

No, that's not what was seen. The detection was a signal peak, not individual photons, i.e. it's a wave phenomenon. Klaynos's comment is quite relevant to the concept here.

[stormwarrior]

hmm, It is described that two photons quantum tunneled through prisms and reached the sensor at the same time as the rest of the photons reached their destination.

 

What your telling me is that just a wave phenomenon and if it were one photon it couldnt have happened? The relevance of a singular photon versus a pair of photons is what?

 

What was seen using your perception? I am using seen in regards to my own perception of what I read from an article and the data from the experiment.

 

I would love to understand the relevance of this violation of SR. And I can already here people saying this is not a violation of SR, how is this not a violation of SR. Care to explain why your perception indicates that this is not a violation of SR.

 

Thank you Swantont, Norman and Klaynos for the discussion I find this area of science to be intriguing and very profitable.

 

Anyone up for a game of chess?

[swansont]

The theory describes single photons tunnelling, but the experiment description (such as it is in the ArXiv paper) does not indicate that it was single-photon. That is probably the cause of the confusion.

[Norman Albers]

 

 

I find this area of science to be intriguing and very profitable.

 

Anyone up for a game of chess?

 

Intriguing you damn will betcha; profitable, HORSEFEATHERS.

[stormwarrior]

Yep profitable.

 

I use my mind to distinguish things in diverse and complex situations.

 

how could understanding of relativity profit me? Simple. It provides me with entertaining thoughts of the what if, it spawns imagination and intricate thought. It shows me the difference between ignorance and genius and all the grey matter between those too that are very relative.

 

Remember not all treasures are gold and silver, but treasure can come in many diverse and unique profits beyond that of which monetary mediums could ever afford.

 

 

So Yes my horse-feathers are profitable! any care to buy my magic beans?

[Norman Albers]

Profitable in that sense yes. You caught me in a cynical mood. Farsight is into beans, ask him. Then again, just what sort of magic beans?

[lakmilis]

and conventional physics does *not* predict you travel in time if you would travel faster than light in medium. It is simply the medium of our senses with highest velocity in vacuum, and so has propagated the largest sensory universe of which we are aware of. If in conventional physics or just intuitively at all, you would not travel in time, but be able to observer backwards in time. eg. you could see yourself flying to a planet when already there, but you coul d not affect it. if you flew long enough, you could see dinosaurs on earth. you dont move in time, but you do perceive backwards in time, as time is connected to the fastest sense, vision aka light energy (this was a simplified manner of light, energy , time and observation by all means but should suffice for the erm stormy guy)