Received 03/09/2007 03:29
FW: faster than the speed of light
-----Original Message-----
From: David Low [mailto:david [at] davidlow [dot] com]
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 5:29 AM
To: 'sas [at] sasobservatory [dot] com'
Subject: FW: faster than the speed of light
-----Original Message-----
From: David Low [mailto:david [at] davidlow [dot] com]
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 5:28 AM
To: 'sas [at] sasobservatory [dot] org'
Cc: 'Kathleen Willis'
Subject: RE: faster than the speed of light
Hi Glenn,
I know it's hopeless to try to send email to you, but I'll copy Kathleen, so
here goes.
The experiment you referred to is pretty old. Everybody knows that some
things can go faster than the speed of light.
For instance, Superman!
Plus, I just read an article that says that rats will skip an exam if they
know they will probably get the wrong answer. (Which is exactly what I did
when I walked into an unexpected mid-term math exam in college on one
occasion.)
The obvious conclusion is that rats can go faster than the speed of light.
Thanks for taking care of the cat and beer.
David
-----Original Message-----
From: SAS [mailto:staff [at] sasobservatory [dot] org]
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 9:32 PM
To: David Low
Subject: faster than the speed of light
Hey David
How's the vacation, I figured you would want to read this news clip so you
could practice swearing in Spanish:
Source: CBCNews
Scientists have finally exceeded the speed of light, causing a light pulse
to travel hundreds of times faster than normal.
It raced so fast the pulse exited a specially-prepared chamber before it
even finished entering it.
The experiment is the first-ever evidence of faster-than-light motion.
The result appears to be at odds with one of the basic principles of Albert
Einstein's theory of relativity, that nothing can go
faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per second.
However, Lijun Wang, one of the scientists from the NEC Research Institute
in Princeton, N.J., says their findings are not at odds
with Einstein.
She says their experiment only disproves the general misconception that
nothing can move faster than the speed of light.
The scientific statement "nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed
of light" is an entirely different belief, one that has
yet to be proven wrong. The NEC experiment caused a pulse of light, a group
of waves with no mass, to go faster than light.
For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated
atoms that boost the speed of light waves causing a
pulse that shoots through the vapor about 300 times faster than it would
take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum.
Light travels slower in any medium more dense than a vacuum, which has no
density at all. For example, light traveling through glass
slows to two-thirds its speed in a vacuum. If the glass is altered, the
light can be slowed even further.
The NEC team produced the opposite effect. Inside a chamber, they changed
the state of a vapor in a way that light traveling through
it would travel faster than normal.
When the pulse of light traveled through the vapor, the pulse reconfigured
as some component waves stretched and others compressed.
As the waves approached the end of the chamber, they recombined, forming the
original pulse.
The key to the experiment was that the pulse reformed before it could have
gotten there by simply traveling through empty space.
This means that, when the waves of the light distorted, the pulse traveled
forward in time.
The NEC researchers published their results in this week's issue of the
journal Nature.
Did you get my last email?
The cat is "chilled, the keg of celebration is still pouring smoothly, and
your lock still bumps grate with the bump key..........
Glenn
