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Speed of Light has been broken
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Ladies Man
Platinum Member
Rapidskies
Golden Member
Very cool, I didn't know about this either. 🙂
The point was to get you to look at the original thread but I'm to lazy to post it. It explains that the speed of light is not actually broken and that einstein is still right. Even my recent repost of this topic explains that and it would probably be easier to find.
BTW, I found the how stuff works article the same way as the OP.
brunswickite
Diamond Member
very nice 🙂
silverpig
Lifer
It hasn't really been broken... It's useless if you can't transfer information.
Let's imagine that every person in the world is spaced out in a long line that wraps around the planet many times. We try to send a signal from the front of the line to the back by clapping. The first person claps and when the second person hears it, they clap and so on. The speed of the information travelling down the line is going to be the speed of sound minus some factor of human delay.
Now let's change the experiment and give everyone a set time at which to clap, and set the times so that they all clap in order but also so that the last person claps just 0.0001 of a second after the first person does (assume people are that accurate with their timing). Now if we look at this clapping sequence we can see the wave of claps moves at much greater than the speed of light down the line, but because everyone is told before when to clap, there isn't any information travelling down the line.
Massless things may move at greater than the speed of light, but no information can be carried by them. Once you require information to be carried, you must travel <= c.
Let's imagine that every person in the world is spaced out in a long line that wraps around the planet many times. We try to send a signal from the front of the line to the back by clapping. The first person claps and when the second person hears it, they clap and so on. The speed of the information travelling down the line is going to be the speed of sound minus some factor of human delay.
Now let's change the experiment and give everyone a set time at which to clap, and set the times so that they all clap in order but also so that the last person claps just 0.0001 of a second after the first person does (assume people are that accurate with their timing). Now if we look at this clapping sequence we can see the wave of claps moves at much greater than the speed of light down the line, but because everyone is told before when to clap, there isn't any information travelling down the line.
Massless things may move at greater than the speed of light, but no information can be carried by them. Once you require information to be carried, you must travel <= c.
That doesn't make any sense. Just because something is useless to us, doesn't mean it wasn't broken. Perhaps there aren't any practical applications for it but it would make people re-think some theories. I get your analogy but I'm not sure how it relates because I don't have enough info on the experiment. How come it doesn't link to the NY Times article?
blurredvision
Lifer
It's new to me, so fvck off.
silverpig
Lifer
No, this doesn't violate anything. It won't cause any re-thinking because it's allowed. Of course I'm just speculating here as the head scientists are still coming to their own conclusions, but my guess is that all that this was was an example of quantum mechanical tunnelling.
There was an experiment performed a while back where they used a source to generate 2 photons, and a prism to split the photons up so that they took different paths. The photons were sent along paths of mirrors that made one photon's path cross the other's before allowing the photons to hit detectors. The paths were adjusted to be exactly the same length from the prism to the crossing point by adjusting the mirrors until the photons interfered with each other and caused the detectors to NOT go off. Once the system was calibrated as such, they put an extremely thin piece of mica (wierd kind of stone) in the path of one of the photons and found that the detectors went off, meaning that one of the photons had made it to the crossover point before the other. By adjusting the mirrors they found that in order to make the photons arrive at the crossover point at the same time they had to LENGTHEN the path of the photon that had to go through the mica. This means that the photon had to travel faster than light to get through the mica.
However, Einstein's theories were not broken. Here is an explanation of how:
Photons aren't discrete point particles with a definite beginning and end. They're "fuzzy" so to speak. ....,,,,;;;;||||;;;;,,,,.... Kinda like that. When a photon interferes with another one, it's basically a probability function that determines when the photons will actually interact. It may be when the first . hits the middle of the photon, it's PROBABLY when the |||| part hits, but it may also be when the last . hits too... All the travelling (quantum mechanical tunnelling actually) through the mica did was shift the photon to look like this: ........,,,,,,;;;;;;||||;;,, which made it more likely for the photons to miss, as the biggest "bulk" of one photon was shifted ahead slightly.
In fact, once they had repeated the experiment enough times they found out that sometimes travelling through the mica made the photon "slower", sometimes it had no effect, and most times it made it go faster.
I guess it's akin to me sending you a .txt file on a 1bps modem with the following text.
a;lskdjfa;slkdjfa;slkdjfBLUEasldkjf
As you can see, it's mostly garbage with only one good chunk of information. Now, let's shift the file to be:
asldkjfBLUEa;lskdjfa;slkdjfa;slkdjf
Now, I send this to someone else, also at 1 bps.
The other person will get the message (blue) first, even though the line speeds are the same. Even if they get the message twice as fast as you, it doesn't mean their internet connection is faster. Shifts in where the "mass" of the message is placed can appear as though the message came across more quickly, even though it really hasn't. This isn't a very good analogy, but it's in h4x0r talk so I think it may help.
Zenmervolt
Elite member
This is absolutely fascinating. Do keep talking about it.
ZV
ZV
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