Scientists Break the Speed of Light
I knew they could do it!!!!
Every time people think something can’t be done someone goes and does it. This time it’s the notion that no object can go faster than the speed of light; scientists in Germany have done just that.
This ability to travel faster than the speed of light is probably very disturbing to the late Professor Einstein, whose Theory of Relativity indicated that no object could be propelled faster than the speed of light. Guess it’s time to re-write the science books.
While this break-through has come in a lab, it will take several more years, maybe even generations, before practical applications impact our lives. But what would those impacts be?
For one, travel to distant solar systems would now be possible. That would of course improve our exploration abilities, but also the travel industry – we would be able to take vacations on different worlds. I wonder if they have Radisson Hotels on Alpha Centuri?
Shipping would be greatly impacted. The ability to instantly move goods from the manufacturer to distribution centers would eliminate the need for long-hall trucks and truckers, as well as boats, barges, and aircraft.
The biggest change would be in the military, and it presents some chilling possibilities. A country, (or a rogue group), with craft able to move at the speed of light could attack a country in an instant, without any warning or hint of impending doom.
Consider this extreeme possibility. A country sends out a craft at the speed of light, blink – it is over New York City and drops an atomic bomb; blink – it is over Washington, D.C. and drops an atomic bomb; blink – it is over Chicago and drops an atomic bomb; blink – it is over Dallas and drops an atomic bomb; blink – it is over Houston and drops an atomic bomb; blink – it is over Los Angeles and drops an atomic bomb. All in about the same amount of time as it took you to read this paragraph.
Let us hope and pray that the world is able to live together in peace before this breakthrough develops into useable technology.
The article can be found at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml
The entire article:
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/08/2007A 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.
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.
The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.
Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.”
As a physicist, I think the author of the news article misunderstood, or (possibly) Dr. Nimtz is being intentionally misleading. Travelling faster than the speed of light is equivalent to time travel: if you have one, then the other is guaranteed. The problem would not be one of dropping bombs on distant cities within seconds of one another, the problem would be already-bombed cities going into the past to pre-emptively bomb their enemies. Unlike the direction taken in the Terminator movies, combattants would be able to kill successively earlier ancestors, which I (philosophically) think is a paradox.
That said, there are many exceptions to the meaning of the word “travel.” A spot of light from a laser can travel faster than the speed of light if you shine it on a distant planet and wiggle it. Similarly, if you had a giant pair of sissors, you could close it quickly enough that the vertex between them travels faster than the speed of light. The thing about these exceptions is that they cannot pass information and therefore change the order of a chain of causes.
Similarly, there are many quantum effects involving distant, simultaneous events. The first really good demonstration of this was in the late 70’s with Aspect and Granger’s measurement of Bell’s Theorem. What saves the speed of light limit is the fact that quantum uncertainty fills in all the gaps to make it impossible to reverse the order of a chain of causes. In fact, the distinctions can be extremely subtle: very often something appears to transmit information faster than the speed of light, until you carefully go through the calculation again and discover that it’s cancelled by something else, or that the wave propagates, but the information is lost, or a hundred other things.
Perhaps I’m wrong, and ten years from now faster-than-light travel will be a proven fact, along with time travel and whatever could possibly make it logically consistent. But the speed-of-light boundary is a very different thing from an engineering limitation, like the speed of sound.
jpivarski
August 18, 2007
I’m still stuck on instant food delivery…I haven’t made it to the political ramifications yet.
charleen
August 19, 2007