Scientists Break Speed of Light

[Doc]

Scientists break the speed of light | the Daily Mail

If this is true, then one of Einstein's theories has been proven wrong, but it has been thought that general realitivity has been flawed for some time.

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 traveled 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.

So, basically, two light beams leave at the same time and one gets reflected through a prism. They both still arrive at the same time, meaning the reflected beam had to be moving faster than the speed of light as the non-reflected beam arrived at the same time.

 

[Mirage]

It doesn't add up. Light is fast enough that even sophisticated machinery could have a hard time judging if the times were exactly the same.

It would also depend on how far the light had to go in the first place. It might look like it was the same speed at first glance, but it makes no sense for a mirror to cause an increase in the speed of light.

It would need to be done on a HUGE scale for it to become noticeable, and even then I doubt it is possible to demonstrate.

The idea is that one light is moving faster than another light? All light moves the same speed. I doubt they will be able to prove otherwise.

 

[Doc]

From what I understand, the best way for it to get there in the same amount of time would be to shorten the distance, not to raise it's speed. The article claims that, through quantum tunneling, a (photon?) sped up faster than the speed of light.

 

[ReplyworthyThat]

Yes, i read this last year in my science magazine, honestly I am not that in to quantum tunneling theory to understand what it really means, what they proved, what they want to say with it; for all i know, it might very well be a way to explode our mind with things that only gives you headache but is brobably only a totally logic phenomenon exposed to us in a spoiler way. Well, that's the press for you!

 

[Hi_Im_Tim]

That is interesting, Einstein was proven wrong.

 

[Van]

It mentioned something about time travel if this were possible. I've never understood what time travel has to do with light or its speed, can anyone clarify?

Otherwise it looks pretty interesting.

 

[dDave]

This reminds me of a time when scientists took several different typed of matching clocks, including digital, regular, and stopwatches and had one of each on the ground and one of each in a space shuttle, they launched off the space shuttle with all of the clocks being the exact same time. After orbiting the earth once the clocks on the space shuttle were about 15 hours behind, and nothing about the clocks was changed except they were put into space,

So technically is it possible slow down time, but not to stop it completely or to reverse it.