German Scientists Declare Speed of Light Broken

The Grim Squeaker · Post by **The Grim Squeaker** » 2007-09-06 12:13pm

D Tech wrote:German Scientists Declare Speed of Light Broken

A "Macroscopic Violation" of Special Relativity

According to modern physics, the speed of light is a fundamental, unbreakable limit. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have done just that, and propelled a stream of photons faster than the speed of light.

Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz, Germany, have been researching a phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling. Two prisms are placed together. When a light is shown through the prisms, a detector picks up the light and records information about the photon. However, when the two prisms are separated, Nimtz and Stahlhofen discovered that photons would occasionally "tunnel" between the prisms -- arriving at the detector sooner than should theoretically be possible.

The two scientists say they have now tunneled photons "instantaneously" across a distance of up to one meter. Their conclusion, stated in a recent paper, is that the speed limit of special relativity has been violated. Dr. Nimtz claims quantum tunneling is a little understood process that is "the most important" aspect of quantum physics, one that may be responsible for the computational efficiency of the human brain.

Being able to violate the speed of light would undermine our current understanding of space and time, and lead to a number of bizarre effects, such as being able to travel backwards in time.

However, Dr. Aephraim Steinberg, from the University of Toronto, disagrees with the findings. He says its all just a matter of interpretation. The "wave packet" of the virtual photon exceeded the speed of light, but no actual information was transmitted that fast. Therefore, according to Steinberg, Einstein's cosmic speed limit remains safe.

Nimtz and Stahlhofen may be the first scientists to create a macro-scale experiment.

In a statement published sortly after the paper was announced, Nimitz claims, "For the time being, this is the only violation [of special relativity] that I know of."

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2007-09-06 01:16pm

Alternate title:

German Scientists Declared to be Laughingstocks

It's going to take a lot of implausibly solid data to make me doubt the absoluteness of the speed of light.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-06 01:34pm

For c to really be "broken", as it were, you'd have to have some practical use rather than "Oh look, we made photons appear faster than they normally are". That doesn't really do all the much to the universe, where altering such an integral factor would pretty much determine the fate of the universe.

This is no more useful than waving a laser pointer about and saying you've made light go FTL. You can't use it for anything like communications, so what good is it?

Now, playing around with stuff like Heim theory may change things and give us a way of getting interstellar drives.

Starglider · Post by **Starglider** » 2007-09-06 02:36pm

Not again.

Sing along now; "GROUP AND PHASE VELOCITY ARE NOT FRONT VELOCITY".

Every single one of these 'we broke the speed of light LOL' announcements is about an exeriment that used tricks to increase the group and/or phase velocity (i.e. the apparent velocity of the overall pulse) without doing anything about the front velocity (i.e. the speed at which information actually propagates). We've been seeing them for at least a decade and the media /still/ gets excited about them. It's like an automatic way to get your obscure physics lab some mass media coverage.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-09-06 02:41pm

I love how these articles alway say 'it is teh scientists sayin it is limitz', instead of 'it's a concept supported by science'. Some people honestly don't see the difference between the 'sound barrier' and the 'light barrier' due to misrepresentations like this.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-06 03:49pm

Starglider wrote:Not again.

Sing along now; "GROUP AND PHASE VELOCITY ARE NOT FRONT VELOCITY".

Every single one of these 'we broke the speed of light LOL' announcements is about an exeriment that used tricks to increase the group and/or phase velocity (i.e. the apparent velocity of the overall pulse) without doing anything about the front velocity (i.e. the speed at which information actually propagates). We've been seeing them for at least a decade and the media /still/ gets excited about them. It's like an automatic way to get your obscure physics lab some mass media coverage.

Yeah, like the "We made sound travel faster than light!" stuff that crops up now and then.

Wake me up when they actually get a ship to piss on causality with an FTL drive.

Molyneux · Post by **Molyneux** » 2007-09-06 05:22pm

Admiral Valdemar wrote:
Starglider wrote:Not again.

Sing along now; "GROUP AND PHASE VELOCITY ARE NOT FRONT VELOCITY".

Every single one of these 'we broke the speed of light LOL' announcements is about an exeriment that used tricks to increase the group and/or phase velocity (i.e. the apparent velocity of the overall pulse) without doing anything about the front velocity (i.e. the speed at which information actually propagates). We've been seeing them for at least a decade and the media /still/ gets excited about them. It's like an automatic way to get your obscure physics lab some mass media coverage.
Yeah, like the "We made sound travel faster than light!" stuff that crops up now and then.

Wake me up when they actually get a ship to piss on causality with an FTL drive.

We don't need an FTL drive, though it would be nice. I would be greatly honored and satisfied if we just came up with the beginnings of an FTL or, better yet, instantaneous mode of communication in my lifetime.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-06 05:28pm

Unless we've got physics drastically wrong, we won't be getting those sorts of things. Manipulating gravity and inertia, perhaps. Using that to go faster than light, no.

Molyneux · Post by **Molyneux** » 2007-09-06 07:09pm

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Unless we've got physics drastically wrong, we won't be getting those sorts of things. Manipulating gravity and inertia, perhaps. Using that to go faster than light, no.

Wormholes?

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2007-09-06 07:25pm

Molyneux wrote:
Admiral Valdemar wrote:Unless we've got physics drastically wrong, we won't be getting those sorts of things. Manipulating gravity and inertia, perhaps. Using that to go faster than light, no.
Wormholes?

Wormholes tend to require unpleasantries such as large amounts of "negative" matter, and that's aside from the fact that we don't really know whether they can hold together solidly or not.

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2007-09-06 07:27pm

Sorry, it wouldn't let me edit.

At least wormholes avoid the whole "faster than light" issue, since you are only effectively moving faster than light, not actually moving faster (you are just shrinking the distance).

Molyneux · Post by **Molyneux** » 2007-09-06 09:50pm

Guardsman Bass wrote:Sorry, it wouldn't let me edit.

At least wormholes avoid the whole "faster than light" issue, since you are only effectively moving faster than light, not actually moving faster (you are just shrinking the distance).

I was actually thinking of using wormholes as effective time machines...which lets you get around the lightspeed barrier with ease. Look at today's Dresden Codak for a good example of that.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-07 12:12pm

Guardsman Bass wrote:
Wormholes tend to require unpleasantries such as large amounts of "negative" matter, and that's aside from the fact that we don't really know whether they can hold together solidly or not.

If they can work, the best you'll get is the Conjoiner drive like idea, with wormholes getting their propellant from the past when the universe was a quark-gluon soup. I doubt anything larger than sub-atomic particles could traverse such bridges without being insanely large and stable. Information exchange may also be iffy, given FTL wormhole travel still affects causality, so instead you'd be in the alternate time line David Deutsch concept.

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2007-09-07 11:32pm

How does FTL wormhole travel affect causality? I thought the whole point of a wormhole was that it didn't send your ship faster than light; it just narrows the distance.

Wyrm · Post by **Wyrm** » 2007-09-08 06:52pm

Guardsman Bass wrote:How does FTL wormhole travel affect causality? I thought the whole point of a wormhole was that it didn't send your ship faster than light; it just narrows the distance.

You can use wormholes to construct time machines, supposedly.

Also, any sort of FTL basically guarantees that someone, in some reference frame, is going to see a causality violation. Remember, events in the absolute elsewhere do not global simultineaty in all reference frames, so even though you might see a signal arrive at the other mouth of the wormhole before you send it, I might. Furthermore, I can find a reference frame such that I'll see the signal arrive at my end an arbitrary time before you send it, such that I can use an identical wormhole setup to send the signal back to you, and you'll receive the message back before you even transmit it.

The Duchess of Zeon · Post by **The Duchess of Zeon** » 2007-09-08 07:08pm

Heim-Droscher theory basically says that the universal speed limit is slightly changed at very high dimensional orders, to be about 53 times what it is to us in our current perspective; therefore it isn't really a faster than light drive at all. It just raises the speed limit; you still can't break it.

Wyrm · Post by **Wyrm** » 2007-09-08 07:30pm

53 times too high. Call me when they've observed that neutral electron that theory predicts. Oh wait! We should already seen bajillions of them when we detected the top quark. Speaking of quarks, where do the top, bottom, strange, and charm quarks fit into Heim-Droscher theory?

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-08 08:37pm

Wyrm wrote:53 times too high. Call me when they've observed that neutral electron that theory predicts. Oh wait! We should already seen bajillions of them when we detected the top quark. Speaking of quarks, where do the top, bottom, strange, and charm quarks fit into Heim-Droscher theory?

They readily admit that not everything the theory purports to predict has been found, but if you've been paying attention lately, there is apparently something to it worth investigating.

Personally, if it misses out on a grand unified theory between classical and quantum physics but gives us a proper interstellar drive instead, I'll be happy.

Molyneux · Post by **Molyneux** » 2007-09-08 10:12pm

What's all that great about causality, anyhow? As long as it holds true in general, I personally wouldn't give a damn if it broke down in special cases.

More to the point: do we have any reason to assume positively that the universe does hold to causality, or is it axiomatic?

Wyrm · Post by **Wyrm** » 2007-09-09 11:04am

Admiral Valdemar wrote:
Wyrm wrote:53 times too high. Call me when they've observed that neutral electron that theory predicts. Oh wait! We should already seen bajillions of them when we detected the top quark. Speaking of quarks, where do the top, bottom, strange, and charm quarks fit into Heim-Droscher theory?
They readily admit that not everything the theory purports to predict has been found, but if you've been paying attention lately, there is apparently something to it worth investigating.

Predicting a low mass particle that's never been found is a rather glaring hole in the the theory, I think. There's a reason why the Higgs boson's mass is thought to be at least 114.4 GeV; it just isn't found in lower energy experiments. If there really is a neutral electron-like particle whose mass is on the order of an electron, Fermilab should be finding them (or evidence of their existence) by the trillion. That's the plain fact that's staring me in the face.

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Personally, if it misses out on a grand unified theory between classical and quantum physics but gives us a proper interstellar drive instead, I'll be happy.

That and a bar of soap will get you a free bath. Just because the speed of light is higher at higher dimensional orders doesn't mean that a 4-dimensional being like yourself (restricted to low dimensional orders) will ever benefit from that. Again, call me when they've observed that neutral electron — it should be the easiest part of Heim-Droscher theory to confirm.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-09 12:43pm

Again, none of which changes it from being an avenue of research. When the physics community finally sees it in the light of cold fusion after far greater research is done than what has currently been financed, then I'll ignore it as being a trivial area to look into. It's not like there's a theory out there that has ever been 100% correct. Even in the case of the neutral electron, as I understand it the theory is still evolving and the particle may not factor into it after all, so problem solved.

I don't buy the bullshit hyperspace and 53 times light speed crap. I'm more interested in something validating M-theory or a drive that allows us true interstellar travel without colossal masses of propellant.