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Engage Warp Drive?

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This reminds me of a thought experiment: Imagine you are in the center of a sphere that is 2 light years across. Point a light at the wall of the sphere then rotate the beam in a 180 deg arc. The image of the light will reach the barrier in a year then zip half way across the sphere in seconds. This is possible because there is no information contained in it. On the flip side, information that does exceed light speed (like quantum entanglement) is random and meaningless so nothing really makes the trip.

I would place my bet against CERN actually having detected a FTL neutrino.
 
I can actually run faster than the speed of light...........
I can go one better i can actually walk faster than the speed of light.........

A bit more interesting was the recent "slow light" demonstration, by Dr. Lene V. Hau of Harvard University. We've known for a hundred years that the speed of light is slower through solids and liquids than through empty space. The "slowest" natural substance is diamond, which bogs light down to about 0.4c, or 40% of its vacuum speed. But in 1999, Hau and her team went nature one better, using a cloud of ultracold sodium atoms, held in a "coupled" state by a laser beam, to slow the photons of another laser beam down to less than three meters per second. In subsequent experiments they were able to reduce this speed still further, until finally, last month, they were able to stop the beam completely.
Stopping light with an ordinary barrier--say, a lens cap -- destroys the photons irretrievably. If they were carrying a signal, too bad; the signal is lost forever. Hau's apparatus does something quite different: when the coupling laser is turned off, the energy and quantum state of the signal photons are stored as a "spin" in the gaseous sodium atoms. Later, when the coupling laser is turned back on, the reconstructed signal beam emerges from the cloud, unchanged from its previous state. This isn't a trick or gimmick; the light actually slows down, and actually stops. The implications for optical computing are huge.
But while this lets us travel--even walk!--faster than "the speed of light" through a Hau cell, it isn't much use for interstellar communication.
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http://www.voidspace.org.uk/technology/faster_light.shtml

---------- Post added at 12:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:31 PM ----------

I wonder what happened to this research

http://news.scotsman.com/spacescience/Welcome-to-Mars-express-only.2739585.jp

The paper

http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/aiaa2004-3700-a4.pdf
 
Stepping stones, build around one theory one can prove/measure/replicate in a way. I'm pretty sure Einstein would be smiling, interesting that they were that surprised and didn't expect it.
 
Interesting article. I pose Einstein and these other researchers are both correct. The speed of light is the limit on a practical basis but the neutrino has this quark, I mean quirk, to be able to go faster than the speed of light so it really doesn't change anything for now but does open doors to other possibilities.
 
I would like to think Einstein would be delighted to find his theories superseded by valid work that advances our understanding of how the universe works. If physics advances, this will happen eventually.
 
Maybe its very simple... we're replacing the light particle with a neutrino as the fastest entity :)

Instead of energy being equal to matter times the speed of light squared (E=MC2) we'll have a new formula of energy equals matter times the speed of a FTL neutrino squared lol.

Does this mean that mass travelling at the speed of a neutrino will be even heavier than mass travelling at the speed of light ?

What is the ultimate effect of recalibrating our current physics to FTL neutrino speed ???

Can we now open up a can of wormholes ? :)
 
Lee Smolin has published some interesting work on looking for cracks in general relativity as evidenced mostly by work in astrophysics. "The Trouble With Physics" is a great read. Smolin and like minded physicists take issue with String Theories lack of testable hypotheses. And so they search for experiments and cosmologically gathered data that don't quite square with traditional theory. There seem to be a few. Some mathematical constants, including the speed of light, may not have been constant over the life of the universe. Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe" is another great source.

Enough--I'm way in over my pointed head!
 
As I understand it, at the end of the 1800's, scientists were pretty sure there was nothing more to discover, just about everything that could be found had been. The guy in charge of the Patent Office was even in favor of closing it because there was nothing else to invent.

Buit there was just this little bit of tidying up to do.
There was something wrong with calculations involving "Black Body Radiation", the answers they were getting didn't match the current theories.

And studying that one seemingly insignificant thing led to the discovery of Quantum Mechanics.

Maybe this will be our modern version of Black Body Radiation.
 
The cited article from the Associated Press was a bit sensationalized. CERN's announcement wasn't a claim, it was an invitation to investigate an anomaly. The AP's spin was designed to sell a story.

This is a portion of CERN's actual press release:



The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms. For this reason, many searches have been made for deviations from Einstein’s theory of relativity, so far not finding any such evidence. The strong constraints arising from these observations makes an interpretation of the OPERA measurement in terms of modification of Einstein’s theory unlikely, and give further strong reason to seek new independent measurements.
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Regards as always,
Gary
 
My six year old asked me the other day if the there was 7 dimensions or 500. I tried to answer him as best as I could but It made me think that science often thinks they know everthing and dismisses the questions we should be asking. I know grants must be gotten and science must be pragmatic to some degree but what about the child like wonder and exploration of the universe.
 
whenever i hear FTL travel isnt possible i think of this

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.
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That's what science does-notice anomalies in data, and design a new experiment to address the anomalous data and see if it is anomalous. I see no problem with the reporting of the unanticipated data by AP or anyone else. Who, or what might be threatened by it, is a much more political question.
 
bbridges said:
That's what science does-notice anomalies in data, and design a new experiment to address the anomalous data and see if it is anomalous. I see no problem with the reporting of the unanticipated data by AP or anyone else. Who, or what might be threatened by it, is a much more political question.
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...or a religious one. Replacing light as a constant by something more exotic is going to be interesting to watch. This discovery may be the missing link leading to a grand unifying theory.
 
From what I've read futher, there may have been errors in the timing. Perhaps, perhaps not. I personally see no reason why FTL particles wouldn't exist. I also believe that quantum entanglement is FTL. But I'm not a theoretical physicist after all.
 
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