127.0.0.1 wrote:
On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:44:41 -0700
"R. Steve Walz" wrote:
127.0.0.1 wrote:
On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:10:18 -0700
"R. Steve Walz" wrote:
Hey Steve, do you believe this to be true or is bull****?
'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.
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There always seems to be the problem that for one of several reasons,
no INFORMATION can be transmitted by such an interaction, so the
principle is useless.
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.
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Except astronuts have rest mass, and thus are not photons.
The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum
tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently
unbreakable laws.
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Nonsense, that's how the EPROMs in your computer have worked for the
last 30 YEARS!
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/mai...cispeed116.xml
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One, this is VERY OLD news, at least 10 years old.
Two, this is what happens when you turn under-educated amateur science
correspondents loose with the interpetation of complicated news in
physics. It doesn't violate anything, although it is surprising and
interesting. The reason that it doesn't violate relativity is because
photons have NO REST MASS!! The limitations on energies are true only
for particles with a rest mass, namely matter, versus "energy".
Steve
I doubt they're under-educated. From what I gather 'Theoretical
Physicist' are shun by those in the hierarchy in the physic's
community. (Well, Not shun but ignored and dismissed as cranks)
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No, you've been misled, or have misled yourself.
Case in point, MIT grads exploring M-Theory/String-Theory being denied
access/use of the particle accelerator, school, claiming that the $cost
was too high and their theories aren't sound enough to even be tested.
---------------------
That's just budget triage, happens every day where a facility is in
high demand, it does NOT reflect on their work, it just says to them:
"Get more background and preliminaries done, and we'll try to stick
it in the budget next year". They have to do that with all the proposals
that are not high priority.
What's wrong with giving Theoretical Physicist the use of the particle
accelerator anytime they want it? Particle Accelerators are massive and
I guess it does cost a great deal of money to even start it, but they
should have a right to explore their theories, yes?
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It's a matter of scarce funding and more practical priorities, not a
matter of "rights". Anytime they want it? The cost of a particle
accelerator they could have on that basis would have to be solely
funded by THEIR project, an impossibility!
Walz do you know that a microscopic bit of antimatter has been created
in particle accelerators?
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Yup. It's called pair production. Make a fat enough photon and it breaks
down into an electron and a positron and then they recombine. That is
VERy old news.
problem is containment, when matter meets antimatter BOOM!!
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Well, you need a lot of it to go boom, but matter-antimatter
annihilation yields 9 x 10^16 Watt-Seconds per Kilogram. A Kg
is a LOT of positrons!
It's 1836/(1.67262158 × 10-27) = 1.097678053394e+30 to be
fairly exact.
Let these guys play with particle accelerators and
figure out how to create & contain this stuff. The energy source of
antimatter is beyond your comprehension, it would be the purest
form of energy in the universe, I say let these guys harvest this
energy and not call them cranks.
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It's not "beyond our comprehension", it's been well-understood for
quite a while now, where do you get this over-dramatized paranoid
crap?
Steve