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