Friday, August 17, 2007
Was speed of light broken ?
If you read slahdot you probably bumped in to this one :-)
http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0681
I do not think so :-) yet ... But there are a lot of experiments that play with speed of waves and quantum effects ( this one is actual cool and may give us some thing if we can only find out how to do it on greater distances :-))
Anyway, just for fun :-)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/ns-lst081607.php
Here is a scientific explanation :
Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, Canada, doesn't dispute Nimtz and Stahlhofen's results. However, Einstein can rest easy, he says. The photons don't violate relativity: it's just a question of interpretation.
Steinberg explains Nimtz and Stahlhofen's observations by way of analogy with a 20-car bullet train departing Chicago for New York. The stopwatch starts when the centre of the train leaves the station, but the train leaves cars behind at each stop. So when the train arrives in New York, now comprising only two cars, its centre has moved ahead, although the train itself hasn't exceeded its reported speed.
"If you're standing at the two stations, looking at your watch, it seems to you these people have broken the speed limit," Steinberg says. "They've got there faster than they should have, but it just happens that the only ones you see arrive are in the front car. So they had that head start, but they were never travelling especially fast."
If you read slahdot you probably bumped in to this one :-)
http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0681
I do not think so :-) yet ... But there are a lot of experiments that play with speed of waves and quantum effects ( this one is actual cool and may give us some thing if we can only find out how to do it on greater distances :-))
Anyway, just for fun :-)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/ns-lst081607.php
Here is a scientific explanation :
Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, Canada, doesn't dispute Nimtz and Stahlhofen's results. However, Einstein can rest easy, he says. The photons don't violate relativity: it's just a question of interpretation.
Steinberg explains Nimtz and Stahlhofen's observations by way of analogy with a 20-car bullet train departing Chicago for New York. The stopwatch starts when the centre of the train leaves the station, but the train leaves cars behind at each stop. So when the train arrives in New York, now comprising only two cars, its centre has moved ahead, although the train itself hasn't exceeded its reported speed.
"If you're standing at the two stations, looking at your watch, it seems to you these people have broken the speed limit," Steinberg says. "They've got there faster than they should have, but it just happens that the only ones you see arrive are in the front car. So they had that head start, but they were never travelling especially fast."
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