Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Special Relativity Violated (Again)



"Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it. He had rejected his theory, even before most physicists had come to accept it." -- Lee Smolin, physicist, 2004

Science Daily: Single Photons Observed at Seemingly Faster-Than-Light Speeds.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2010) — Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, can speed up photons (particles of light) to seemingly faster-than-light speeds through a stack of materials by adding a single, strategically placed layer.

6 comments:

Quantum_Flux said...

Now if they could just transmit information faster than light, lol, then I could win next week's lottory.

KV said...

OIM,

READ! This is from the article:

What the JQI researchers are seeing can be explained by the wave properties of light. In this experiment, the light begins and ends its existence acting as a particle -- a photon. But when one of these photons hits a boundary between the layers of material, it creates waves at each surface, and the traveling light waves interfere with each other just as opposing ocean waves cause a riptide at the beach. With the H and L layers arranged just right, the interfering light waves combine to give rise to transmitted photons that emerge early. No faster than light speed information transfer occurs because, in actuality, it is something of an illusion: only a small proportion of photons make it through the stack, and if all the initial photons were detected, the detectors would record photons over a normal distribution of times.

You are a porn of science.

Jeffery Keown said...

Not really, porn is at least entertaining.

OilIsMastery said...

KV,

"in actuality, it is something of an illusion"

In actuality the illusion is relativity.

Quantum_Flux said...

Science involves math that make predictions that are true, OIM is certainly not anywhere near that caliber of beamfuck.

OilIsMastery said...

QF,

"Science involves math that make predictions that are true"

LOL.

You mean like how atheists used math to predict that meteorites don't exist?

You mean like how atheists used math to predict that parthenogenesis is impossible?

You mean like how gravitational physicists used math to predict that heavier than air flying machines are impossible?

So why do you believe in gravitation again? Because gravitation predicted that Neptune was 1 billion miles away from where it's actually located?