Radio waves can travel faster than light?

[Kernl Sandrs]

or so they say they've done at Los Alamos.

The polarization synchrotron

made me giggle. Sounds so fake.

 

[AlexG]

From Scientificamerican.com

The researchers, John Singleton and Andrea Schmidt of Los Alamos and their colleagues, have built a sort of wire in which an electric pulse can outpace light. They get away with it because the pulse is not a causal process. It does not ripple down the line because charged particles are bumping into each other, a process that is subject to Einstein's speed limit. Instead, an external controller drives the particles and can synchronize them to make a pulse pass through the wire at whatever speed you want. The particles are like dominos in a row. A causal process is the usual domino effect in which each domino knocks down the next; the dominos move at their own speed, determined by their size and spacing. An acausal process is if you knocked down all the dominos with your hand; the dominos move however fast you can make them. The photo above shows an early version of the contraption; the wire is the white arc on the right, and the controllers are the circuit boards on the left.

This method of breaching the speed barrier might seem like cheating--after all, no material object is breaching the barrier. But electromagnetically it doesn't matter. Whatever the origin of the pulse in a wire, it involves the motion of electric charge and emits electromagnetic radiation. The radiation propagates outward at the speed of light, but is forever shaped by the speed of whatever generated it

Nothing is actually traveling faster than light.

 

[Kernl Sandrs]

From Scientificamerican.com



Nothing is actually traveling faster than light.

So wait, you're telling me the title of this article I found on the internet is misleading?

 

[AlexG]

So wait, you're telling me the title of this article I found on the internet is misleading?

:bravo: Yes.

 

[M00se1989]

Nothing is actually traveling faster than light.

Very true statement because it is all traveling at the same constant. the only difference is how "nothing" is percieved...:bugeye:

 

[fedr808]

They have made a photon travel faster than light...but it involves quantum tunneling or somesuch so it does not technically break the speed limit.

I may be off, the article was from a year ago, but basically they launched photon 'a' at a target, launched a second photon at the same target at the same distance and time, and did something that I think involved quantum tunneling which made photon 'b' arrive significantly sooner at the target than photon 'a'

 

[M00se1989]

Yeah and at harvard they got light to travel at 12m/s.

it sounds like some sort of magic trick, or illusion...

to slow down or speed up light... But its all just a different frequency in the matter it moves through at the atomic level. A wave navigates through every medium, They just become harder to catch after encountering a dense material that is not made to catch them. But while they are in the "prism" you gain a little control over them.

 

[phlogistician]

Yes it can be done, but it doesn't violate causality. There have been other experiments to accelerate photons before.