'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.
   
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921

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."

Ako je istinaa..Onda se otvaraju Novi Horizonti 

tunelovanje - vrlo interesantan efekat. nazalost ,radi samo kod kvantnih cestica , i to sa malom verovatnocom (npr posalje se x fotona a stigne samo 1)

Nije bitno koliko stigne, vec kakav uticaj ce imati na daljnja  shvatanja.

Mene vise interesuje prakticnost te brzine.Teorija po sebi nista ne znaci ako nema primenu (praksu).Po definiciji tahioni su brzi od svetlosti  i mislim (mozda i gresim) neutrino ali slaba vajda od toga.Mada nista se nezna.

http://www.indopedia.org/Tachyon.html

Tahioni su hipoteticne cestice, koliko znam, jos nedokazane. A prakticnost, polako, ima vremena. Znas ono, kada su otkrili da se kristal obrce u magnetnom polju, nisu znali sta ce s time. Proslo je dvadesetak godina dok se nisu setili sta ce, i napravili LCD.

Slazem se mada je i lightsoft u pravu. Fotoni ili te subatomske cestice (tahioni) imaju toliko malu masu da je zanemariva, a i nije mi jasno kako mozemo tj kako smo u stanju da opazimo nesto kad izmedju nas i tako necega malog stoje nemjerljivi i neshvatljivi prostori cije zakone nismo ni blizu da skontamo.

Shvaticemi. polako, tek smo zagrebali u te tajne.


Scientists have finally exceeded the speed of light, causing a light pulse to travel hundreds of times faster than normal.

It raced so fast the pulse exited a specially-prepared chamber before it even finished entering it.

The experiment is the first-ever evidence of faster-than-light motion.

The result appears to be at odds with one of the basic principles of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, that nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per second.

However, Lijun Wang, one of the scientists from the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., says their findings are not at odds with Einstein.

She says their experiment only disproves the general misconception that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

The scientific statement "nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light" is an entirely different belief, one that has yet to be proven wrong. The NEC experiment caused a pulse of light, a group of waves with no mass, to go faster than light.
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For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapour of laser-irradiated atoms that boost the speed of light waves causing a pulse that shoots through the vapour about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum.

Light travels slower in any medium more dense than a vacuum, which has no density at all. For example, light travelling through glass slows to two-thirds its speed in a vacuum. If the glass is altered, the light can be slowed even further.

The NEC team produced the opposite effect. Inside a chamber, they changed the state of a vapour in a way that light travelling through it would travel faster than normal.

When the pulse of light travelled through the vapour, the pulse reconfigured as some component waves stretched and others compressed. As the waves approached the end of the chamber, they recombined, forming the original pulse.

The key to the experiment was that the pulse reformed before it could have gotten there by simply travelling through empty space. This means that, when the waves of the light distorted, the pulse traveled forward in time.

The NEC researchers published their results in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

ovo ce se najverovatnije u prvo vreme koristiti za prenos informacija bez kashnjenja . mislim da ce postai znachajno tek kad se chovechanstvo malo odlepi od zemlje