Scientists: 'We have broken speed of light'

[Henny]

'We have broken speed of light'
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/08/2007

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.
 
According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences.

For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.

The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.

Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml

[kimba1]

what da fu#$

I thought we did this 3 years ago
was that reasearch been proven false?

[sirs]

Uh oh....that's going to get someone a ticket     

[Brassmask]

Personally, I've always felt that going faster than the speed of light was absolutely possible.  It's just a matter of using something else to power the object or whatever that is travelling.   All this nonsense about a traveller arriving before he's left is simply hogwash.

It's all about perspective.  A turtle racing a beam of light over ten is going to lose.  It's that simple.  Just because something goes really fast doesn't mean it's bending time or the continuum or anything.  It's just going fast.

[The_Professor]

Big deal. They broke the speed of light barrier in 1956 in Forbidden Planet.

[Plane]

Personally, I've always felt that going faster than the speed of light was absolutely possible.  It's just a matter of using something else to power the object or whatever that is travelling.   All this nonsense about a traveller arriving before he's left is simply hogwash.

It's all about perspective.  A turtle racing a beam of light over ten is going to lose.  It's that simple.  Just because something goes really fast doesn't mean it's bending time or the continuum or anything.  It's just going fast.

The power requred for accelleration is the thing.
The faster a thing is the more power will be required to accellerate it .

You are useing more gas to travel east than west but only an unnoticeabe tiny amount because the relationshp is non -linear.
At small fractions of the speed of light the difrence it makes is unnoticed ,but at 90% of the speed of light you would spend more power to get to 91% than you did to get from 80% to 90%, this is the nature of a non-linear relationship.

Tunnelling is fascnateing and very counterintuitive. At the size scale of a photon or even an electron a certan percentage of particles fall across barriers that should have stopped them all , this is what gives "tunnelling" its name as though a few electrons found a tunnell through the barrier. If tunnelling is also allowing transmission faster than light I want to read further .

[The_Professor]

see http://stupac2.blogspot.com/2007/08/we-have-not-broken-speed-of-light.html