US gov boffins achieve speeds faster than light Scientists working in a US government laboratory say they have managed to transmit a signal from point to point faster than the speed of light in a vacuum - in a development apparently violating the laws of physics. According to a statement issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): According to …
> Nice bit of trollery there ;)
Not so much trolling as B1FFing,[1] I'd say; you'd have to be pretty ignorant of 'net culture[2] to mistake that for a troll, much less a serious comment. (I have to wonder how many of the currently 33 downvoters fall into one of those two categories.)
Of course traditionally B1FF-text includes digit-substitutions (though those now are primarily identified with 133t-speak), long sigs, etc. But its primary characteristics are an obviously stupid comment (as opposed to true trolling, which should realistic enough to fool a number of victims), and block capitals. Also, B1FF is traditionally produced with a filter, and BDG's probably just using Caps Lock; but that's an implementation detail.
But yes, nicely done.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/B1FF.html
[2] I.e., a noob, to a first approximation.
It would appear that grammar is not your friend. I can forgive this as you are somewhat at a disadvantage, not being from the home of Shakespeare or Dickens.
On the other hand, it would appear that the Caps Lock key is your friend. Might I suggest either a new keyboard, or perhaps some education on it's use?
... or the article if I am not mistaken. But AFAIK no information was sent. It's not a "travelling faster than the speed of light" trick, it's just a trick.
For example, get person A to hold up a card saying "What would you like to drink" at time =0.
While at about 1 ly away, get someone to hold up a card saying "I'll have a pint please" at time =0+10 seconds.
This looks like you have sent a message faster than light, but really, you set it up ahead of time (you would need about a years setup time if travelling at the speed of light). No information was sent. :P
I think the idea is the individual particles are still moving at the same speed but there is a ripple through them where each particle responds to the one behind like a Mexican wave.
I don't understand why you need qubits, you can just smash the laser when the Vogons show up and the wave will go back to flat line. You have successfully sent a time value for when an event has happened?
Indeed. Nothing here is actually moving faster than light, apart from "the place where the currently most-energetic photon is". That's not a thing, it's an abstract concept.
There's a similar thought experiment where you have two long perfectly rigid poles, each a light-year in length, side-by-side. You start by tilting one slightly relative to the other, so that instead of being parallel, they are touching at one end like so: |\ and about ten centimeters apart at the other end. Then you move the tilted pole ten centimeters sideways, so that it passes right over the other one and ends up on the other side of it: \| and now they're touching at the opposite end to where they were initially in contact. You've only moved the whole rod ten centimeters, so you can do that quickly (thought experiment and idealised perfectly rigid rods, remember), but the point of contact between the two rods has travelled an entire light year in those few seconds.
Hmm. That's actually the whole point of the speed-of-light-is-a-maximum thing and the reason why it's such a fundamental concept in our understanding of physics today. It governs even the rigidity of your rods. It's WHY you can't have infinitely rigid rods. The point of contact will not move that fast because you can't have rods that stiff because the speed of light is a maximum.
Actually, I believe the relevant limit you want to consider when it comes to rods and communicating information along them is not the speed of light, but the speed of sound in that material. Which will be rather significantly slower.
The experiment described in the article is a bit different. Frames of reference anyone?
Funny how in our thought experiments we so quickly latch on to the possibilities of the infinite/eternal and yet so often we refuse to acknowledge any such influence in our worldviews ...
And how much thought went into this thought experiment?
Obviously you aren't going to get rigid poles a light year long in practise but less obviously you aren't going to get them in theory either because of the very law it is trying to disprove. It takes takes time for the molecules adjacent to one to end to move when the end moves & so on all down the pole. I suspect given the stiffest pole possible (now that should get spam filtered) it would take about a year for the far end to catch up (if it were a light year away). See my comments on moving lights.
Given " two long perfectly rigid poles" information can travel faster than the speed of light - given a moped that does 5x10^8m/s pizza can travel faster than the speed of light.
Where's the icon for "I believe your premise is false" or indeed "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
Actually, there's no need for infinitely rigid rods. You can demonstrate this "science" with two fingers. Raise one to a certain height and raise the other to a slightly lower height. Now quickly raise the second one to be higher than the first.
Did you see what happened? The finger height maximum moved instantaneously from one place to another.
OK, you can quibble about exactly how fast it moved, but separate the fingers by a few light years and there's no doubt it'd be a lot faster than light speed.
"if real cutting edge science were used, people would just go "yeah, four-wave superluminal travel, right"."
Well at first glance, as a retired physicist, my first thoughts on reading this article (and being unable to read the original) were "why is this different than the well known difference between phase velocity and group velocity", which was cutting edge science back in the 1870s for acoustics (Rayleigh), and in the 1980s and later for electromagnetic stuff (look up superluminal wave propagation).
If anyone can shed any light...
I read it as a phase versus group velocity as well and in fact superluminal signals which do not carry information are boringly mundane. The spot from a rotating light beam against a target a very long way away can achieve any velocity. I do not understand the bit about Qbits so I may be very wrong...
"spot from a rotating light beam against a target a very long way away can achieve any velocity"
Nothing in the "spot" has moved, photon A arrived at point a (1 light year away), rotate the source 180 and photon B arrives at point b (2 light years away from a) only 1 one year+tiny bit later but nothing moved from a to b. No particle no data so no velocity - what is this "signal"?
"signals which do not carry information" AFAIK: signal=information
so signal - information > c
=> nothing > c
TechnicalBen, my take on it is that you have a pre-agreed way to read the numbers off of the light beam at both ends, and you just take advantage of the phase shift of the light beam itself and modulate accordingly to get your information there 'a tiny tiny tiny bit faster than light'.
nothing is physically travelling faster than light, just the numbers just ride the phase peaks like a surfer on a wave. like a stopped clock surfs a 12hour time wave to be right twice a day. provided you know when to read the cycle, you'll get the information you need. so each end has to know how to read and transmit the information accordingly.
meh, whatevs. probly wrong init. safe.
Someone thought "Yikes, CERN will get all the funding this year due to their publicity over faster than light particles, lets do similar and theorise something that industry will want so pump money into us"
new financial year and all that
"you canna change the laws of physics" Montgomery Scott, chief engineer USS Enterprise
But if said speed-of-light-inna-vacuum is used to heat a sausage-onna-stick, Dibbler's theory of the amount of curry required per pint consumed is proved invalid. So next week, Cut-Me-Own-Theory will have been achieved, and all without rubilidium chambers and hence it happened - it will have happened - it has will have happened - faster than light. Can I have my gazzillion in funding now please?
Apologies to Douglas Pratchett and Terry Adams
"By performing measurements of quantum discord between fast beams and reference beams, the group hopes to determine how useful this fast light could be for the transmission and processing of quantum information," the NIST announcement says.
Would such transmission and processing of quantum information deliver virtual teleportation into Free Space Base Territories in Live Operational Virtual Environments* ......... Cyber Commands with Semantic Control of Programmable Assets ...... Virtual Machine Robots for Cosmic Conditioning of Human Beings?
What do you know of Global Operating Devices and Internet Pioneers in LOVE* with True Love. Would they stumble and fall at the Enigmatic Dilemma or leap boldly forward of all with leading action in HyperRadioProActive IT, to be copied and replicated wherever for similar Personalised IT Clone result.
Whatever Next? CyberIntelAIgent Beings Assisting Intelligence Communities with Surreal Advanced Systems? Smart Capitalising Money goes long and deep and in for the wild ride on that Doozy, which apparently is presently unplugged from the System spectacularly failing to server and protect the System with Generous Grateful Feeds and Virtually Free Seeds .... for the Gracious Bounties that are Rewarded in the Selfless Giving of Unconditional Aid with Anonymous Help for Everywhere.
Your post looks like it is either coming from an 8th grader's programming assignment AI, or a broken Spam-bot, broken in the sense that while it contains a great many "buzzwords", it lacks links to work-at-home schemes and penis-enlargement pills.
It could be you are trying to send us a message covertly with all the misplaced Capital letters; WNCABACSASSCMDSSGGFVFSGBRSGUAAHE, nope, broken spam-bot.
Are we mixing the waves again, son?
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/20/20.html
Also:
"qubits whose value is not simply 0 or 1 but potentially any value from 0 to 1"
NO! They have a value on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere
Calm down dear...
Qubits
Do they have a value ON the Bloch sphere or within it as mixed states? I think it is essential that such states are within the Bloch sphere to enable quantum computers to function... But hey what do I know?? Readers please educate me on the righteous path of quantum computing (if it is possible at all(how do you get the data out?))
PS. I don't know what I'm talking about
Or roll up an orange and eat your sleeves. That works quite well if for nothing else than eating your sleeves is quite tiring, and after that and rolling up the orange it's time for a good nap. And a nap does wonders for your disposition.
This type of claim is akin to moving your ass in one end of the bathtub and exclaiming surprise that the water magically leaves the bathtub in the other end. Faster-than-light? Perpetuum mobile? Cold-fusion? Bring it on!
The described experiment is not only an old hat, but it is misleading marketing of science. Bear with me for a moment, and you'll understand the magic trick.
The "information flow faster than light" only works with coherent light. Coherent light can be generated with a laser, and the photon waves that make up the light have well-defined "phases", i.e., they reproducibly sum up to a larger wave, to a smaller wave, or to zero at certain points in space-time.
You can shift the points of constructive interference (the electromagnetic wave of several photons sum up to a bigger wave) or destructive interference (the electromagnetic waves of photons have opposite sign and destruct one another) by shifting the phase. So you can shift the point where you see the photon towards the back or the front of the laser pulse --> If we observe constructive interference at the back end of the wave in a position A and at the front end of the wave in a position B, it looks like the bulk of the wave moved faster than light!!! But was any information transmitted?
The information in the described experiment is stored in the photon phases. The phases are inscribed in the laser cavity, which in these types of experiments emits a quasi-continuous electromagnetic wave. So you can pretend that the light jumped from A to B, but the coherent wave has been there is there all along and there is no information flowing from point A to B. If you modify the phases after the cavity, the inscribed phase information will be transmitted with exactly the speed of light.
Yep. That's what I was getting at, but I only know the limits, not the reasons. Thanks for mentioning them.
So it was like they were casting 2 shadows on opposite sides of a room. Shadow A one side, shadow B the other. While you can cast both shadows "instantaneous" to each other, you cannot claim "we might be able to send a message instantaneous from A to B". Anyone watching the shadows sees the light from them (or blocking of light, as it's a shadow ;) ) happen at slower than light timescales. So you don't get the message sent any faster. :(
Or as mentioned in another post, it's the "light house" effect of a rotating beam of light (but rotating along it's axis this time). While the beam rotates very fast, anyone watching it only gets the beam of light to reach them at speeds slower than light.
I find it remarkable that a bunch of dudes on a forum are able to, with such confidence, dismiss the results of months of work by highly trained individuals who are among the top in a very difficult and specialized field - and this having not only not read the study, but with your only source of information being the heavily simplified and distilled information in one news article on an IT web site.
You guys are obviously in the wrong business. The field of physics needs you.
It has been my experience that some people in the IT industry like to categorise other people into tiers of intelligence based on their employment. These IT people are of course in the top tier (even if they specifically only spend their day fixing printers and telling people to switch their computer off and on again) along with the physicists, biochemists, etc. This gives them the ability to comment knowingly on any subject because it couldn't possibly be that some things are beyond their understanding.
I believe this stems from having knowledge about devices the general public use everyday but generally have no clue about. This breeds arrogance and leads these IT bods to mistakenly believe that because they have a greater mastery of one subject compared to most people they must have a greater knowledge of all 'worthy' subjects than most people.
This post has been deleted by its author
whilst I appreciate the sarcasm in your amusing post I feel compelled to opine thus:
The highly trained individuals to whom you refer would (rightly) have zero respect for us if we took them, or any other highly trained individuals, at their word. This is a logical fallacy called "accepting the argument from authority."
It has been my privilege to meet many top-flight scientists and my feeling is they would be more impressed with even our ill-informed attempts to debunk their approach than the unthinking 'scientists say...' acceptance of the other lay media where their results will be reported.
I'd say there's a pretty big difference between posing questions based on your limited prior knowledge of of a topic in order to check that the idea is sound and dismissing something completely out of hand even though you couldn't even explain the basic principles of what was being discussed*.
*See the half dozen posts in this thread that just assume these scientists got their result by way of a timing error like at CERN
The greater the burden of proof.
The claim of being able to send information faster than the speed of light, crops up regularly, and gets dismissed just as regularly. This sounds suspiciously like a number of past ones of those. (do some digging into phase velocity, im a comtard and too lazy to find useful references out there for you)
There may be a way of FTL information transmission via superposition and the spooky action at a distance. But this has not yet been realised.
You mean like how people could with the FTL neutrino claim?
It's not the "months of work" anyone is contesting. It's the mistaken descriptions from the media. Or the false conclusions from unrelated evidence. Such as "we think this can be used to send FTL messages" is an obvious false conclusion to the paper. The experiment shows an "apparent" FTL effect. Thus it can never be used to send any information.
Where has this claim of information travelling faster than light had any evidence presented or stood up to any scientific scrutiny whatsoever? Yet you are prepared to take this article at face value simply because it says someone ha a theory somewhere and they might be 'a government scientist'.
Real science is open to new ideas but it doesn't take something as fact until it is somewhat proven. What are the odds that someone has managed to bypass a basic rule of the universe, versus it is a trick/mistake?
Did I say I was prepared to take the article at face value? Hmm... no. What I said was that it's absurd to *confidently and quickly dismiss it based on very little information*.
I haven't got a problem with *discussing* it. I have a problem with people arrogantly and offhandedly tossing the whole thing in the bin without even bothering to understand what they're binning.
Also, science doesn't really "take something as fact" at all - not even relativity, which is, as you describe, a 'basic rule of the universe'. But basic rules of the universe are only basic rules of the universe until they aren't.
Yes, the odds are low, but that *in itself* is a very bad reason to dismiss the discussion out of hand.
I suggest reading 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn (IIRC). It's not perfect, as the nearly-equally-opaque Wikipedia page points out, and you'll want to shoot yourself in the head about fifty times as you slog through it - diagramming the guy's sentences would be a project akin to analyzing the US tax code longhand - but it's worth it for the perspective you gain.
Paragraph 1 says, "...managed to transmit a signal from point to point faster than the speed of light in a vacuum..."
Paragraph 8 contradicts this, saying, "In four-wave mixing, researchers send 200-nanosecond-long "seed" pulses of laser light into a heated cell containing atomic rubidium vapor along with a separate "pump" beam at a different frequency from the seed pulses... "
"a heated cell containing rubidium vapor" doesn't sound like a vacuum to me.
Still, as we cannot yet reasonably-conveniently install and maintain heated, rubidium-vapor-filled garden hoses between Earth and other celestial bodies whose inhabitants with which we wish to communicate, AT&T, BT, et. al. need not worry about any serious competition.
I'm pretty sure the article meant:
"...managed to transmit a signal from point to point faster than the speed of light in a vacuum..."
rather than:
"...managed to transmit a signal from point to point faster than the speed of light in a vacuum..."
which would actually be meaningless because the speed of light is not constant (without respect to the medium through which it is traveling.)
What I assumed from the article was that if you sent information with qubits using this method you would be able to infer the state of the qubit before the light making up the qubit arrived. Essentially observing the quantum information without observing it*.
*I'm no physicist and my grasp of quantum mechanics is tenuous so it's VERY likely I'm talking out of my arse here.
If I have understood correctly the movements are only temporary. It is quicker on for half a cycle and slower for the other, thereby averaging its speed to that of the speed of light.
I see this as being the same as any given point on the outside of a wheel, for half of a revolution that point is travelling faster than the axle but the same point travels slower on the second half of the rotation.
The importance being that no part of any object can arrive any quicker than any other part of the object for the same distance travelled.
I am not a physician so I could be completely and utterely wrong, corrections are welcome.
Am still laughing, and have ordered 4 tubes... watch this space...
Anyways up, shirley this is the old phase velocity vs group velocity phenomena, you can't send any info via this route. The statistics get in the way, drowning out your superluminal 'signal' in noise till it turns to mush... Which leads me back to the first thing I mentioned. How nice ;)
Oh and have a look at this, could do with some of these to help with the Veet AND its on-topic!
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/scissors.html
How fast was the kit that measured the laser able to operate - does it measure the beam instantly, does it have a nanosecond measuring window. - How fast. By this think of a camera shutter. If the shutter could open and close faster than the speed of light then you would see nothing, if it was slower then light would get thru - not best example but you get a feel for what I'm questioning here.
So unless the measureing equipment is able to measure near to the speed of light or its margin for error would make this test unviable. Now using a larger distance reduces this error of margin. But without more details its hard to validate. Also do they measure from the center of the edge of the gas vapour as this in itself can have effect. Say you send 4 beams and they interacts and casue a 5th beam to be created and traverse backwards and this happens at a midpoint then you will instantly see it appear to travel faster than light when it is not.
So many questions, so many answears, so exciting. Science rocks.
ok you have point A and point B
they are 10 units apart
light moves at say 5 units per second so to get from A to B it would take 2 light units
to measure the light at point A and point B we have a measureing device of some sorts
this measure device takes 1 light unit of time to measure any sample
Given this premise you can see that the speed of measurement can impact the results and in this area .000000001% margin of error is still alot. As such to truely measure things they use large distances to in essence slow things down enough to make that margin of error smaller.
This is why they tested neutreno's over a distance of nearly the entire planet and still made a error.
Given this - I find anything done in a lab which is small in terms of how far light can bounce around in it or anything else to be flawed before it even starts.
Thing I found in life in general that to get a accurate sample you realy want to sample 4x the speed of the data involved (video being a poor but acurate example of this when you want say you film something at 500x500 and also film it at 2000x2000 and reduce it down to 500x500, even with the same lenses etc you will get a better picture from the downsampled 2kx2k film at 500x500 than shooting raw at 500x500). So to mearure the speed of light accurately you would need to be able to measure it at 4 times the speed of light. This is deemed impossible and rightly so, this is why you cheat by in essence slowing down the data and in this case by having a larger distance is how you do it, though you never completely eliminate that margin of error you simply end up shifting that decimal point further and in essence reduce the margin of error.
As it stands it's like measureing a 10 pixel image with a 2 pixel camera and declaring you see 12 pixels.
If I still fail to explain myself then I feel assured that the universe is just as bad at explaining itself as well and in that I have good company.
Heck, even a trolley dolly can push her cart of wares faster than a plane. If she's pushing her cart from the back towards the front, her forward velocity is in excess of the plane's.
Sure, her velocity relative to the plane is minimal, but relative to the whole universe it is still greater than that of the plane. It's the same on those 'moving pavements' at airports, you can stand still, or walk. If you choose to walk, you're actually moving at a fair old lick due to the combined velocity. You could probably beat Usain Bolt in a 100m sprint if you run.
If these guys have figured a way of making data carried on the light wave increasing its velocity relative to the wave, then it would be travelling faster than light by moving forward on the wave instead of just being carried by it. Perhaps these experiments could lead to a way of making it easier to control the Beagle 9 Mars lander without that annoying 20 minute delay?
As observed by a common idiot, being me.
You made the universal mistake when it comes to the speed of light and relativity.
Get your airplane, and speed it up to the speed of light. Now ask the trolley dolly for some "Iced Tea". Your sitting at the front of the plane, the Air Crew at the back. Do they ever reach you? Relativity says no one travels faster than light, not even on our speed of light aircraft.
There are some videos on in that give a really good description, look them up. :)
In my enlightened state I felt a presence from 3ns in the future... She told me to stop messing around with Rubidium atoms and such and concentrate with the matter in hand. She told me the winning lottery numbers for Friday. Also she said Man U would win the league...
Wow, it was all a dream... or was it?
You run up the train but aren't travelling faster than it???
The train is a 300yds long, we both get on the last carriage, I walk up the train to the first carriage. It arrives and we both get off. I'm at the ticket barrier, you are down the platform and walk to the ticket barrier.
I got there first - ie travelled further in the same time, so either I travelled faster than you or time dilated significantly. I can't see time dilation effects occurring at London Midland speeds!
Seems like more of a cheat than a loophole - like running down the aisle of a moving train. Sure, technically you are moving faster than the train is but you are never going to arrive ahead of the train so ultimately, you are only as fast as the carrier regardless of how fast you are moving on the carrier.
That said, forgive my layman's understanding of this article if I have completely missed the mark.
If you run down the aisle of a train you are running in the opposite direction that the train is moving. So if the train is moving at the speed of light and you are running down the aisle you are moving slightly slower than the speed of light. You must start running up the aisle from the back of the train. When you reach the front you will have traveled faster than the speed of light. How cool is that?
But isn't this exactly like saying that the batton in a relay race travels faster than the runner carrying it on account that it starts from his back hand and finishes outstretched before him?
It doesn't matter if those points are 2mm apart or 2ly, is still only going to make 50ns difference.
50 nanoseconds faster then the speed of light in a vacuum sounds specific right? However 50ns over 500ns is enormous while 50ns over 500 km is piddling and questionable.
Why questionable because the Einstein limit is for the THEORETICAL Speed of light in a perfect vacuum. However there is no perfect vacuum and recent tests of quantum foam interactions says there can never be a non-plasmonic vacuum at light speeds and time frames.
Therefor we do not yet know the Einstein speed of light against which to measure.
However it is possible we can exceed the speed of light in real vacuums by the proposed method and others.
"50 nanoseconds faster then the speed of light in a vacuum sounds specific right?"
The point of relativity is that the speed of light is fastest in any medium. True, you can slow light down in certain media, but then so will everything else. So whether or not it's a vacuum is unimportant.
The last group of people who made a rash claim about FTL ended up with egg on their faces and the boss resigning. Apparently *this* information hasn't yet crossed the Atlantic.
Regarding the substance of the article, conflicts between local theories, theories with an underlying reality, quantum wavefunction collapse and relativity date back to the EPR experiment. We still don't have a satisfactory resolution. I think the current compromise is unchanged from Bohr's original position which is to deny that there is any such thing as an underlying reality.
If you are happy with that position, feel free to now get excited at the prospect of being able to transmit quantum information as fast as you like, but don't hold your breath waiting for someone to actually build experimental apparatus that can do it on a length scale large enough to permit an unambiguous demonstration.
isn't the really cool (and totally counter to our 'common sense') thing about special relativity the fact that whatever the frame of reference, the speed of light is constant ? By which I mean if you travel on a train at 100mph and a train comes directly towards you at 100mph, that train seems to come towards you at 200mph. But..... if the trains are both travelling at the speed of light (not likely but please bear with me) the train coming towards you appears to travel towards you at the speed of light, not twice the speed of light.
So..... applying the same straight forward formula I would have thought that the peak (or whatever it was, I'm too old to understand this stuff anymore) travelled at no more than the speed of light - at these speeds you can't calculate relative speeds through simple addition or subtraction.
As we Brits know, monarchy travels instantaneously. When the current monarch dies, the next in line becomes king (or queen) without any delay regardless of how far apart he/she is. Admittedly, you can only transmit one bit of information per royal, so we don't use it for signally much.
Monarchy may travel faster than light but the information about it doesn't. Yes the heir becomes the monarch the instant the old monarch dies but no one knows that until the death is observed & the (old) heir doesn't know they are monarch until the information reaches them.
If HRH Prince Charles were put in a sealed box with poison, a radioactive isotope & a cat ... Channel 4 would want to make a reality TV show about it.
This <b>shurely will be one of the brightest</b>. I rank it in this list:
1st: Perpetuum Mobile
2nd: Cold Fusion in a test tube
3rd: Funny lasers appearing faster than light
4th: Faster-than-light Neutrions which develop on rusty USB contacts.
This is a <b>real</b> picture of Burning Snake Oil. Chemically the same as Burning Pork Barrel Fat.
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