A 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. FULL STORY: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml
Agreed. New Scientist isn't what I'd call a place for groundbreaking discovery - Science yes, Nature yes but New Scientist no.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/bad-scie...m-a-queue-for-time-travel-290051.php#c2142654 & http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/bad-scie...m-a-queue-for-time-travel-290051.php#c2142568 good counterpoints.
I remember hearing some reports from a couple of years ago that scientists could slow down the speed of light. As far as I can remember that was proven by other scientists. If light is like that why couldn't it be possible to go beyond lightspeed? Einstein may have been a little bit wrong about the rules of the universe.
it hasn't been done, but they believe they have found a way. Doing it and saying you can are totally different. And about slowing the speed of light, I thought they found a way to stop/bend it, like go 3 feet and stop. I'm not 100% just something I thought I read on Digg...
That's true, but I think the speed of light they're talking about here is the speed of light in a vacuum. Light travels at different speeds depending on the medium it's traveling through.
Yep - slowing down speed of light is dead easy - just shine it through a piece of glass and it'll bend due to the differing speeds in the two media. The ratio of the speed in medium 1 to the speed in medium 2 is known as the refractive index.
No it doesn´t. It is in fact a constant value, 3.0x10(8) m/s (meters per second) to be exact. But another scientist is questioning this value, João Magueijo (he teaches theoretical physics at the Imperial College, London) he claims that "C" (speed of light) maybe slowing down with time. So all the Relativity would be in check. But who knows, this is always a very controversial subject.
That's the value everyone uses, yes. But there is very slight variation in the speed when it passes from one medium to the next - refraction, as I mentioned previously, demonstrates this. White light splits into its component colours when you pass it through a prism because red light (~700 nm wavelength, lower energy) travels slightly slower than violet light (~350 nm wavelength, higher energy).
yes i remember it. photons are particles but light can aalso move has a wave. so if it´s a wave, just frequency changes; but if its a bunch of particles then it´s under gravity laws and may slow down. So we´re stucked... It´s what they call the dual nature, i guess... I never figured that right...
Consider light as a wave of photons, each of which is a small packet of energy. Because they have energy they also have some mass. The energy of the photon depends on the frequency.