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Published by C1ay 08-16-2007
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#3
By
Jay-qu
on
08-16-2007
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| Re: We have broken speed of light I found this journal article by the same two guys - but dont know if it has anything to do with this because its in german  http://www.dpg-tagungen.de/archive/2006/frankfurt/q.pdf |
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#5
By
Jay-qu
on
08-17-2007
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| Re: We have broken speed of light I had a chat with my physics prof today and he was of the same opinion that I had come to - its not a violation of relativity unless you can send information along with the tunneling photons. He said he had heard of experiments like this where photons locally appeared to have traveled faster than light, but in the end if you cant send info with them there is no violation of SR. |
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#6
By
CraigD
on
08-17-2007
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 A better article This post by turtle contains this link to a slightly better article on Nimtz and Stahlhofen claim. I’m pretty confident, when the hype clears, this will be revealed to be a simple – though understandable – publicity stunt, containing nothing scientifically unprecedented, not any technology capable of faster-than-light communication. |
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#8
By
palmtreepathos
on
08-18-2007
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| Re:physicists claim to have broken the speed of light
Seriously I read up on this tunneling of the electrons and that is very cool stuff... sort of a domino effect of the invisible kind? these are the Thx to turtle for that link and expanding this po' weak mind...  | ||
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#9
By
CraigD
on
08-19-2007
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 I change my mind – N & S really have demonstrated FTL communication For anyone who’s not fully grocked Nimtz’s and Stahlhofen’s experiment, here’s a summary: The inside surface of one face of a triangular glass prism acts as a mirror, reflects effectively 100% of visible light. place 2 well-made (faces perfectly flat) prism together, however, and light passes through the inside face to emerge from the second prisms with no change in direction (see paths 1 and 2 in the attached image). N & S placed 2 prisms nearly, but not quite, together. According to ideal, classical (Newtonian) optics, light should be reflected as if the second prism were not present (path 3). However, in the real, quantum-physical world, a small (but rigorously calculable) fraction of the light passes straight through both prisms, as if they were not separated (path 4). This occurs because, in quantum physics, each particle of light (photon) is not a classical particle, with a definite position at any given time, but a distribution of probabilities of the particle being detected at a particular position at a given time. There is a definite, non-zero probability that a photon having entered prism 1 will, a moment later when classical optics predict it being reflected by the prism’s interior face, be located inside prism 2, allowing it to continue in a straight line as if the prisms were together. This “doing the classically impossible” is known as “quantum tunneling”. If you put a detector in the gap between the two prism, you would not detect a photon tunneling between them (path 5) – this effect is not a photon violating the laws of classical refraction and reflection, but realizing a less probable, but not impossible, quantum statistical outcome. The faster-than-light character of this experiment comes from the fact that this not-in-prism-1-but-instead-in-prism-2 tunneling effect is not movement in a classical sense, so doesn’t require any time to “leap” the distance. So, if as N & S appear to have done, you precisely measure the travel time of the tunneling photons, it will be briefer by at least the amount of time required for a non-tunneling photon to travel across the gap between the two prisms. So, the time required for light to travel from an emitter to a detector may be shorter – as N & S have demonstrated – for a photon passing through a couple of separate prisms (path 4) than through air, or possibly vacuum (path 6). I can find no fault with their reasoning or experiment, and am revising my previous opinion that this experiment is not much different than previous “faster than light light” demonstrations involving group velocities. From this, I think it's reasonable to conclude that one could construct from ordinary materials, such as glass, an long optical path, such as a fiber-optic communication cable, capable of transmitting a signal faster than a direct EM signal, such as a visible light or radio beam. I believe, as N & S and reporting journalists suggest, this really is FTL communication, and really does violate predictions of Relativity. When confronted with such a paradox, one should be mindful that, despite being a modern theory, Relativity is a classical mechanical, not a quantum physical, theory, so, in an absolute, objective-reality-based sense, is wrong when applied to experiments of this kind. |
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