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Scientists reportedly create faster than light radio waves

CougarKing

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So did someone turn the "subspace radio" concept from Star Trek into reality or is this just more hype?

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have found a way to create radio waves that travel faster than light (nearly 300 million meters per second or about 670 million miles per hour). This is done by a device called the Polarization Synchrotron (shown at left) that alters radio waves with a spinning magnetic field, forcing them to go faster than light. John Singleton, a fellow at the lab, likens the process to "abus[ing] radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light." He claims that this process would explain why pulsars -dense, spinning stars- emit powerful signals. The faster light signal could catch up to the normal speed signal. As our telescopes pick up the two signals at once, it would appear as a more powerful signal.

The needle-wide waves could be used for new cell phones to connect to satellites directly, instead of having to go through towers, which could provide faster, more secure communication without dead zones. The new technology could also assist in chemotherapy. In chemo, drugs are administered and activated by radio waves that hit the entire body. With the new, thinner waves, the drugs could be used in a more localized manner to target tumors specifically.

The Department of Energy has awarded the lab a $3 million grant to develop the project.

http://www.examiner.com/x-14336-Memphis-Technology-News-Examiner~y2009m7d1-Scientists-create-radio-waves-that-travel-faster-than-light

 
 
So, I guess time travel and interstellar flight are back on the table, now that we know light isn't the fastest thing out there.
 
Kat Stevens said:
So, I guess time travel and interstellar flight are back on the table, now that we know light isn't the fastest thing out there.


Great. I should have realized this was taken from the same source that was the origin of the subject of the "Bomb the Moon" thread. (FACE PALMS!)  :blotto:
 
Some wavelengths of x-ray have an index of refraction less than 1 in certain metals, so some forms of light do actually travel faster than c. 
 
Hrmmm I've seen dozens of articles like this over the years, and each and every one of them confuses the phase velocity of light with the group velocity of light.

It's technically "faster" than the speed of light, but no, you still can't propagate information faster than c.  This experiment was originally carried out in the late 80's with a cloud of laser-cooled cesium atoms.  As far as I can tell, this experiment hasn't really done anything different.

If you want really messed up results, check out some of the bose einstein condensate experiments.

 
Hey King, that's what I was talking about.  One of my profs back at Fac Ed threw this problem at us and asked us to come up with an explanation suitable for a high school kid.  IIRC it had to do with the phase that was c+ having no energy and therefore no mass so faster than c was allowed.
 
I considered re-learning about the phenomenon, which I first heard about in casual conversation years ago, then trying to figure out what his Singleton guy was talking about. As I understood it, there was a characteristic of the wave that appeared to travel faster than light but which could carry no information.

And then Kat Stevens goes and points out that the site's got significantly less integrity than, say, TMZ. The schmucks that pump out "news" for the site are by the company's own admission nothing more than bloggers that get paid per view.
 
Brasidas, you are absolutely correct; the phase velocity of light can sometimes exceed the speed of light, but this in no way allows any form of superluminal motion or energy transfer (think information) to occur/transmit faster than the physical speed of light in vaccuum.  Until somebody comes along with Warp Drive, I'm afraid she can't be done Captain.

This is actually really, really old news.  I'm pretty sure Sommerfeld theorised anomalous dispersion back in the first half of the 1900's, and it was experimentally verified in the late 80's (and many, many times since).  (Apparent) Superluminal motion is also pretty standard fare in the universe, although it has more to do with the viewing orientation that the telescope has than phase or group velocities, which makes me wonder what the hell the author of this piece is going on about.  There are already very good explanations of the origins of things like pulsars and supermassive radio jets.  When we do see superluminal motion in the universe though, we know it's not really travelling faster than light, but it definitely gives us very strong lower limits on energies that we're seeing through the telescope, and that has helped shape our current theories (which is one of the reasons we believe there are supermassive black holes at the centres of nearly every actively forming galaxy). 

The only new thing about this experiment is that it was done in the radio regime.  Not that big of a deal. 
 
KingKikapu said:
(Apparent) Superluminal motion is also pretty standard fare in the universe, although it has more to do with the viewing orientation that the telescope has than phase or group velocities...

That's where a Lorenz transform makes things make sense? Change the reference frame and it's not really travelling faster than light?

Anyway, I went ahead and did a search on the Singleton fellow. Appears to exist, and recently published a paper related to the phenomenon. A model for pulsars was examined. Then a newspaper related to the Examiner crew, who brought us the steaming pile of internet-hit generating excrement about war with the lunar ETs, published a poorly cited story with misinterpreted quotes.

Meh.

Here's the story: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/HealthandScience/LANL_scientist_makes_radio_waves_travel_faster_than_light

Here's an explanation: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2009/07/plagiarism_garbling_and_superl.php?utm_source=nytwidget
 
Brasidas said:
That's where a Lorenz transform makes things make sense? Change the reference frame and it's not really travelling faster than light?

Yar, it's just a geometric time-phased phenomenon.
 
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