Wyz_sub10

From th Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Physicist uses electrical pulse to surpass speed of light

The Admiral

Well, if that is true, and I hope it is, we may someday escape the solar system.

The Admiral

Jesse

This sort of thing has been done a number of times already, but no actual particles or bits of information are traveling faster than light in these experiments. Imagine a long row of sports fans on a bench doing the wave, but instead of watching the person before them to see when to stand up, they all have synchronized watches and stand up on a predetermined schedule--if the bench was 30 light-seconds long, but their schedule was such that the last person stood up 15 seconds after the first one, then the wave would appear to travel twice the speed of light, but again no actual particles or information would have exceeded light speed. My understanding is that something roughly similar goes on in these experiments.

Look at this part of the article:

luvluv

"No, no, no! Light speed is too slow."

"Light speed too slow?"

"Yes, we're going to have to go right to... LUDICROUS SPEED!"

Dark Jedi

I was thinking about the properties of light the other day.

Light appears to travel both in wave and particle form.

Could light be a particle, but travelling in an oscillating wave pattern?

If this were so, then it would seem that light itself exceeds C.
If the particle travels from point A to point B at the speed of light, then the oscillations extend the actual distance travelled, meaning the particle exceeds the speed of light.

Einstein was likely still correct, if this is true. It may be that the linear speed is a false barrier, and that the speed of the particle itself is the true C.

Now, if that is also true, then the particle could be an artifact of relativity. The particle can be pure energy, but in approaching (matching?) C, it takes on the characteristics of mass, as mass itself would begin to reach an infinate mass state.
Perhaps mass is just energy at it's infinate point....

But, I am highly uneducated, so there are likely many holes in this hypothesis.

cfgauss

You can't send information faster than light, you get paradoxes.
For more than you want to know:
http://www.desy.de/pub/www/projects/...Light/FTL.html

and

http://www.desy.de/pub/www/projects/Physics/

Answerer

Quantum entanglement(or teleportation) is another method to send information faster than the speed of light. Its a kind of quantum effect anyway.

cfgauss

Answerer:
NOOOO!!!! NO, NO, NO, NO!!!!!
Saying things like that makes physicists' ears bleed!

Quantum entanglement *CANNOT* send any kind of information faster than light!!!

Here's a good description of entanglement:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2000-08/msg0027463.html

Undercurrent

If you're imagining a discrete particle taking a sinusoidal path in space, then that's not right.

A better, but still flawed, analogy would be to imagine a particle moving in a straight line, but with sinusoidally varying colour while it moves along. The dimension(s) in which photons oscillate are not spacial, therefore there is no "longer path" that the photon is actually taking, and hence no breaking of the light barrier.

Answerer

Bleed? Not really, you are too obessed with the speed of light. Here is an article showing like not all physicists think like you.


http://www.cio.com/archive/031502/et...t_content.html


http://www.cs-journal.org/ll2/II2psscience2.html


http://technovate.org/web/articles/quantumthought.html



If you leave out the task of making a phone call between two vast distance points(so as to confirm or set the next coordinates), quantum entanglement should be able to send messages faster than light.