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'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.
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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."

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Faster than the Speed of Light?

Lambert Dolphin, Physicist

Superman was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, he was more powerful than a locomotive, and was said to be able to travel faster than a speeding bullet.

The speed of a bullet (300-900 m/sec) is no big deal in these days of supersonic aircraft and spacecraft. Yet our fastest space vehicles do no better than one one-hundred thousandth (1:10-5) of the current speed of light. Overcoming gravity (the weakest of all the forces of physics) still takes lots of push and power. The moon remains many days away and the planets many months when traveling as fast as current chemical rocket technology allows.

The nearest star is 4 x 1017 meters away, and the current estimated size for the entire universe is greater than that by ten orders of magnitude or so (about 1026 meters). For a long time the hope of space travel has been left almost entirely in the hands of the science fiction writers. Yet with God there are invariably hidden truths waiting to be discovered that make the best that men can imagine seem like kindergarten.

Newtonian mechanics imposes no maximum upper limit to attainable velocities in the universe, but Einstein's relativity theory does. As charged particles are pushed up near the present speed of light they grow heavier and more and more energy input is required to gain a smaller and smaller increment of increased velocity. At the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), near where I live, electrons injected in the accelerator reach 99.999% of the velocity of light in the first few feet of travel, and then they ride traveling radio waves for two miles down a long evacuated pipe, gaining virtually no additional speed, but mostly acquiring mass (and therefore energy). There is no reason to doubt the highly successful and well-verified theory of relativity in this regard. One can point to countless examples of proven relativistic effects whenever charged particles are involved.

Physicist Hal Puthoff (1) has recently suggested that the ability of a spacecraft to modify the properties of space in its immediate vicinity could allow it to travel faster than light. This is because the speed of light is simply a measure of two properties of the medium of space, or the vacuum, permeability and permittivity. It has been tacitly assumed by some theoreticians that the speed of light might be a measure not only of the electrical properties of space, but also the mechanical properties of space as well. It turns out now that this is probably not the case!

An even very exciting possibility has now come into the light. It has long been known that gravitational forces apparently act instantaneously over the entire universe. Why this should be so is simply glossed over and ignored in every generation of physics classes and in countless technical papers. One way to understand this is to consider what is called "the classical aberration of light"--which was discovered by Bradley in 1728. In fact, aberration data became one of the early methods for measuring the speed of light. Light from the sun requires 8.3 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth during which time the sun and the earth have moved as much as 20 arc seconds with respect to each other. Similarly light from the stars arrives at an angle which can be as much as 20 arc seconds because the earth is moving with respect to the stars. It is by carefully measuring these aberration angles, and knowing the relatively velocities involved, that Bradley made excellent and trustworthy measurements of the velocity of light 250 years ago.

However, during the time interval it takes light to travel from the sun to the earth, the sun and the earth have kept in touch with each other "instantaneously"--or at least very much faster than c! In fact every mass in the universe communicates with all other masses in the universe in a time frame that makes the present speed of light seem like the velocity of molasses on a cold day!

Astronomer Tom Flandern has recently detailed all the evidence that shows that gravitational forces, unlike light, operate with no measurable aberration! (2) But Van Flandern shows that there are sound reasons for believing that the "speed of gravity" is not infinite. By carefully studying the observable data Van Flandern now concludes that the speed of gravity is greater than or equal to the present speed of light by a factor of 2 x 1010. This velocity (6 x 1018 meters per second) turns out to be just below Barry Setterfield's latest estimate of the speed of light everywhere in the universe on Day Two of creation week! Setterfield arrives at this initial velocity of light on the basis of the maximum observed Hubble constant which gives an initial value of c turns out to be 2.54 x 1010 times the present value. (3) Since creation week the diameter of the universe has been constant (a static universe) and the speed of light has dropped precipitously to its present value--following decay curves we can now piece together with some confidence based on (a) measured values of c for the last 300 years, (b) corrections to known radioactive decay dates which go back to approximately 2000 BC, and (c) the observed quantization of the red shift of light from distant galaxies for the time period from creation to about the time of Abraham.

As the universe aged, the free space permittivity and permeability increased and c decreased--but the velocity of gravity may not be tied to the permittivity and permeability of free space! If this the case the velocity of gravity stayed at the original velocity of c. If we can produce a propulsion system based on gravitational principles rather than electromagnetic or chemical ones, we could travel at absolutely enormous speeds--we could hope to push a space craft anywhere in the universe, very literally at warp speeds beyond what even the Starship Enterprise could produce!

By the way, this discussion solely relates to the physical part of the created universe. For now we must defer discussion about how angels travel and communicate--they are spiritual beings. And we must postpone speculation about what we followers of Jesus the Lord may find ourselves capable of doing when we don our new resurrection bodies (these bodies are, after all, "not of this creation"--but spiritual bodies--see 1 Corinthians 15).

If Van Flandern and Setterfield are correct, space travel may indeed be just around the corner! A fringe benefit is that we may at last have clues to help us begin to understand the well-documented behavior of countless UFOs whose velocity and acceleration behavior has thus far defied explanation by conventional physics.

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Speed of light broken with basic lab kit

* 10:03 16 September 2002
* NewScientist.com news service
* Charles Choi

Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department.

Scientists have sent light signals at faster-than-light speeds over the distances of a few metres for the last two decades - but only with the aid of complicated, expensive equipment. Now physicists at Middle Tennessee State University have broken that speed limit over distances of nearly 120 metres, using off-the-shelf equipment costing just $500.

Jeremy Munday and Bill Robertson made a 120-metre-long cable by alternating six- to eight-metre-long lengths of two different kinds of coaxial cable, each with a different electrical impedance. They hooked this hybrid cable up to two signal generators, one of which broadcast a fast wave, the other a slow one. The waves interfere with each other to produce electric pulses, which can be watched using an oscilloscope.

Any pulse, whether electrical, light or sound, can be imagined as a group of tiny intermingled waves. The energy of this "group pulse" rises and falls over space, with a peak in the middle. The different electrical resistances in the hybrid cable cause the waves in the pulse's rear to reflect off each other, accelerating the pulse's peak forward.
Four billion km/h

By using the oscilloscope to trace the pulse's strength and speed, the researchers confirmed they sent the signal's peak tunnelling through the cable at more than four billion kilometres per hour.

"It really is basement science," Robertson said. The apparatus is so simple that Robertson once assembled the setup from scratch in 40 minutes.

While the peak moves faster than light speed, the total energy of the pulse does not. This means Einstein's relativity is preserved, so do not expect super-fast starships or time machines anytime soon.

Signals also get weaker and more distorted the faster they go, so in theory no useful information can get transmitted at faster-than-light speeds, though Robertson hopes his students and others can now rigorously and cheaply test those ideas.

Physicist Alain Hache at the University of Moncton in Canada adds that it may be possible to use this reflection technique to boost electrical signal speeds in computers and telecommunications grids by more than 50 per cent.

Electrical signals usually travel at about two-thirds of light speed in wires. Hache says it may be possible to send unstable electrical signals to near light speed.

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Surfing faster than the speed of light

Wednesday, 30 July 2008 Eric Bland
Discovery News

Future generations could be travelling across the universe faster than the speed of light, without breaking any astronomical road rules, by manipulating extra dimensions of space and time, according to two US physicists.

"We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," says Dr Gerald Cleaver from Baylor University in the US, a coauthor of a paper that recently appeared on ArXiv.org.

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in 1994 by Dr Michael Alcubierre.

The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.
Travelling without moving

The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.

That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

The fabric of space has moved faster than light before, says Cleaver, right after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

"We're recreating the inflationary period of the universe behind the ship," says Cleaver.

While the theory rests on relatively firm ground, the next question is how do you expand space behind the ship and contract it in front of the ship?

Cleaver and Dr Richard Obousy, the other coauthor, propose manipulating the 11th dimension, a special theoretical construct of m-theory (the offspring of string theory), to create the bubble the ship would surf down.

If the 11th dimension could be shrunk behind the ship it would create a bubble of dark energy, the same dark energy that is causing the universe to speed up as time goes on.

Expanding the 11th dimension in front of the ship would eventually cause it to decrease, although two separate steps are required.
Lots of energy

Exactly how the 11th dimension would be expanded and shrunk is still unknown.

"These calculations are based on some arbitrary advance in technology or some alien technology that would let us manipulate the extra dimension," says Cleaver.

What the scientists were able to estimate was the amount of energy necessary, if the technology was available, to change these dimensions: about 10 to the power of 45 joules.

"That's about the amount of energy you'd get if you converted the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy via E = mc squared," says Cleaver, an energy far beyond anything humanity can currently envision creating.

While the challenges to creating a warp drive are quite formidable, the concept is intriguing, says Tufts University theoretical physicist Professor Lawrence Ford.

"If there are extra dimensions and we could manipulate them, that would open up all sorts of exciting possibilities," says Ford.

"I don't see this leading immediately to a warp drive, but I could see it leading to other interesting possibilities in basic scientific research," says Ford.

Cleaver agrees that the creation of a real warp drive is still far away.

"Warp drive isn't doable now, and probably won't be for the next several millenia," says Cleaver.

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