Justice 0 Report post Posted March 7, 2007 Source <h1 class="headline"> Scientists break speed of light</h1> <h4 class="lastupdated">Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:57 PM ET </h4> <h5 class="byline"> CBC News </h5> 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 vapour of laser-irradiated atoms that boost the speed of light waves causing a pulse that shoots through the vapour 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 travelling 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 vapour in a way that light travelling through it would travel faster than normal. When the pulse of light travelled through the vapour, 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 travelling 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. How about that. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Dogbert 0 Report post Posted March 7, 2007 This is the News forum. You want the Six-And-A-Half-Years-Agos forum. Perhaps you could petition the administration to create one. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Justice 0 Report post Posted March 7, 2007 Oh son of a bitch. I didn't notice the news post I stole this from was necroposted. Fuck me. Delete, please. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Slayer 0 Report post Posted March 7, 2007 The light emitted by the article did not reach Justice until recently Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
MarvinisaLunatic 0 Report post Posted March 7, 2007 Justice just got served! /leaves Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Special K 0 Report post Posted March 8, 2007 Shit, someone better fix it! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
