Friday, August 17, 2007

New experiments demostrate possiblility of FTL

Two German physicists claim to have forced light to overcome its own speed limit using the strange phenomenon known as "quantum tunnelling". Exceeding the speed of light, approximately 300,000km per second, is supposed to be completely impossible. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light barrier. The scientists set up an experiment in which microwave photons appeared to travel "instantaneously" between two prisms forming the halves of a cube placed a metre apart. When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them, as expected. After they were moved apart, most of the photons reflected off the first prism they encountered and were picked up by a detector. But a few photons appeared to "tunnel" through the gap separating them as if the prisms were still held together. Although these photons had travelled a longer distance, they arrived at their detector at exactly the same time as the reflected photons. In effect, they seemed to have travelled faster than light.

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post

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