The speed of light has been broken.

[Brandon]

I thought some of you might find this interesting. After years of the scientific community saying that the speed of light can never be broken under any circumstances, it appears as though it can. Two independent labs are claiming they have shattered the light barrier, one by 25%, but the other by an unbelievable 300 times! Here's the article:
www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/06/04/stifgnusa01007.html


Or maybe you'd like to see another?
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/05/30/MN26514.DTL


We've always been told that there's no way that aliens could ever come here because our current theories wouldn' t allow it. Well, maybe its time to re-evaluate our current theories. Granted, this discovery may have no application to interstellar travel, but after hearing all of my life about how this limit was a FACT and could NEVER be broken, it makes me wonder what else they're wrong about.

 

[Cable Man]

Just thinking about that the other day. Why shouldn't we be able to break the light barrier? The sound barrier could not be broken. All we had to do was come up with a little extra energy and a new paradyme (sp?).
Light happens when electrons are excited enough to leave their atoms. They rip away from their atom at a specific energy level. Why couldn't we find a way to make that electron go even faster. It shouldn't be a surprise. Science "facts" change every year. Thanks for sharing the article...it was great!

 

[Oxygen]

Cable Man- Just to let you know, it's "paradigm". So much for phonics, eh?

Anyway, I have never read an article that said that breaking the light barrier was impossible. I have always read the phrase "not currently possible". Of course, I never read a standard science book like the kind you get in schools. Just lucky, I guess. I was always taught that nothing was impossible, and the mere act of imagining the end result was half the work. Now you know what you want, how do you plan to make it happen? I think the truly frightening thing was that the people who taught us this weren't teachers speaking metaphorically about life goals and such. They were scientists in lab coats talking science and the physical world.

Stanford. I should have gone.

 

[Fuse]

The way it's always been told to me is that according to the theory of relativity, once a physical mass achieves the speed of light, it instantly transmutes into energy. This, I have always believed, is as stupid as bug dust. If you think about it, speed is a relative term. I'm sure that relative to some point off in space, we're travelling at speeds matching and greatly exceeding the speed of light.

And then there's always tachyons...

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"They're dead...It's a bit late for them to be getting neurotic about it."

 

[Plato]

Ok, time for some hard science here wouldn't you say so ?

First of all Fuse :

The way it's always been told to me is that according to the theory of relativity, once a physical mass achieves the speed of light, it instantly transmutes into energy.

The people who told you that were or lying or didn't know what they were talking about. According to the theory of relativity accelerating an object with a positive restmass requires an infinite amount of energy. If you want to change mass into energy you will need an equivalent amount of anti-matter in order to do that. Matter and anti-matter will annihilate and in this process energy is created according to the famous formula of Einstein.

The articles are talking about quantum tunnelling, it has been known for decades that this process would indeed break the speed of light for non-tachyons. It is however not a practical process to send information, let alone send a spaceship at a speed greater then the lightspeed.
It would involve something like flying into a wall and hoping that all you elementary particles are going to tunnel through it. The probability for this to happen makes winning the lottary a routine thing to do ! There is nothing that could possibly get this probability up because that is just how the universe works.

Now I would like to comment on Cable Man :

Why couldn't we find a way to make that electron go even faster. It shouldn't be a surprise. Science "facts" change every year.

I don't agree or rather I have a diffrent definition of "fact". A fact is something that is empirically verified and can be verified over and over again if certain conditions are met. You see every experiment involves a certain kind of assumptions and restrictions. If you are saying you want to measure the exact charge of an electron then you will use the findings of electromagnetic theory as your assumptions and a measuring device that works according to these assumtions but which also has some restrictions : your measurement will have a certain error.
The measurements that you do with your device are called facts or data, these will never change again. However the theory that explains it can change, that is refine but the refined theory will still need to be able to explain the facts that you had.



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I err, therefore I exist !

 

[Cable Man]

Plato, I will walk with you in peace on my fact bit. What you say is true however you must admit that in the world of science there are those who take their facts, mix it with their theories, give it to the press, and move forward calling it all fact. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking 'bout.

PS ooooooooHHH never heard of quantum tunneling before. I'll check that out after I figure out in my own head that star issue.