Scientists break the speed of light-Rly? Not rly?

[Anonymous]

It was supposed to be the one speed limit you cannot 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 Einstein's special theory of relativity - that nothing, under any circumstances, can move faster than 186,000 miles per second, or the speed of light.
Travelling faster than light also, in theory, turns back time. According to conventional physics, an astronaut 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 strange phenomenon of quantum tunnelling, in which particles summon up the energy to cross an apparently uncrossable barrier.

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 that 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."

I beckon people with brains to give me their 2¢ on this matter.

[DarkReality]

I think our fundamental problem is that we assume the same photons that left the source did the tunnelling and then arrived at the detector. My guess is that nothing moved faster than the speed of light; instead, the energy was instantaneously "sent" elsewhere (the phenomenon of two photons or electrons that seem to be "connected" has also been observed before).

Where we go from here depends on whether Einstein was right or not, or whether he was only partially right or not. You can't selectively break a fundamental law of physics. Either you can break it or not. Anything else implies that it isn't completely correct (which would kind of suck, as it's a pretty nice and easy rule of thumb >_>).

So either things CAN move faster than the speed of light, or the microwaves induced other microwaves in the other prism through some abstruse quantum effect.

My take. In short I'm essentially saying "who knows."

>_>

Another possible explanation is that the experiment itself was simply too unexact. We can't measure things exactly, mostly due to technical limitations. So the question is, how exact was this experiment and is it possible that this is only an exaggeration of recorded values?

[Alex the Researcher]

Tunneling through meter potential barrier? In quantum mechanics its probability is almost zero (actually depend from form of barrier). Unfortunately I have no access to full text article... and my Quantum Physics at university were "C".

But I've already posted this links (links directly to New Scientist) in MSU Physics Department forum =)

[I.Like.Red]

Actually, scientist's managed to stop light by shining it through a piece of glass fashioned into a bec shape. Pretty cool...

[Tanktunker]

I'm a little fuzzy, so some of the more educated people might have to fix my mistakes, but don't some electrons move from point a to point b without moving through the middle?
By which I mean they "teleport" to a different location, a very small distance, Angstrom small, I think, but teleport nonetheless.

Once again, I don't remember this very clearly, so if Alex, RDD, Joey, Chejrw or someone else that has heard about this (Or can confirm that these are simply my own delusional rantings) can fix this for me that'd be great.

[Hex]

There's a lot of phenomena that happen at the quantum level that we can't explain. In my mind, this is just one to add to the list.

[Vagrant]

As RDD said, it probably has to do with the equipment they were using. Because frankly, it's hard to tell the difference between 16,000,000 mph and 16,000,010 mph, and the machines could be off.

But again, light is one of the strangest things in the universe.

[c00lryguy]

Yeah, quantum physicists proved that light naturally emits radiations on a sub-atomic level. Therefor these sub-radations, or "sub-light" as it's sometimes called, travels faster than the light itself and when you force these sub-lights through a prism, the colors separate and...the uh.....alright, you caught me. I don't actually know anything about this stuff... *walks away slowly with a scientist coat on, babeling about sheep cloning..*

[Alex the Researcher]

From PhysDep (MSU) forum - quantum tunneling is not a hyperlight speed process. So - journalists mistake.
And there is a work - 'On causality proofs of superluminal barrier traversal of frequency band limited wave packets' - at the age of 1994, published in Physics Letters A. ;) There is NO real violation of SRT (Special Relativity Theory):
From the experimental point of view, it is not possible to violate Einstein causality: A front cannot be
generated due to the frequency band limitation in a
real experiment.

2c00lryguy - the emmition and absorption of light is quantum process (by outer electrons in the atom for visible light), in THAT point you are right. =)

[c00lryguy]

Actually, I was just talking out my ass. =)
Also, no double posts please. Just click the Edit button on the bottom right of your old post if you wanna add more stuff to it.

[zbooyjack]

It would be cool if warp drive became a reality someday. (Actually, it probably is, with the universe being so large and all, there must be a civilization somewhere out there among the stars that has figured out how to get from point A to point B in less time than light)