Scientists break the speed of light

reply to post by AlphaAnuOmega


Actually, the path of light is altered by the distortion in the spacetime fabric caused by mass. That is how I understand it from special relativity.

Also, we have not really been able to decide whether light is made of particles(photons) or waves. We are comfortable treating it as one or the other when it convenient! Seems like we don't really understand one of the very basic phenomenon of our universe. Perhaps a greater understanding of light would reveal the true gut of the universe

Of course we can have objects move faster than the speed of light.

Anything is possible. I hope everyone realises that. Especially since we create our own reality.

Originally posted by 2believeor0
Also, we have not really been able to decide whether light is made of particles(photons) or waves.

...or rods.

Saying Einstein was the smartest person that ever lived is like saying Michael Jordan is the best athlete that ever lived. It's false logic. The experiment done did not disprove Einstein's theory entirely. But I do not believe light is the fastest moving thing. It may be by default, but I am 100% certain that there are ways to make matter/mass move faster than the speed of light, or as fast as.

Ofcourse, we do not know of any way to do this...& if we did, we would need another way to keep the matter entirely together.

There are a few scientist that are actually working toward disproving Einstein's theory of relavity. According to Einstein, time is the fourth dimension in this theory. Many years before Einstein claimed this...H.G Wells claimed this, but did not prove it.

I'd quicker say Leonardo Da Vinci was a smarter man than Einstein...simply because of the knowledge he had in the time in which he lived. But he is only smarter scientifically...in whichever field/fields he belonged to. That's what one should say when saying Einstein was the smartest person ever. Life in general is not all about the speed of light and how one can bend space. Scientifically, dealing with physics...he is the smartest man...so far. Not the smartest man that ever lived.

Saying Einstein was the smartest person that ever lived is like saying Michael Jordan is the best athlete that ever lived. It's false logic. The experiment done did not disprove Einstein's theory entirely. But I do not believe light is the fastest moving thing. It may be by default, but I am 100% certain that there are ways to make matter/mass move faster than the speed of light, or as fast as.

Ofcourse, we do not know of any way to do this...& if we did, we would need another way to keep the matter entirely together.

There are a few scientist that are actually working toward disproving Einstein's theory of relavity. According to Einstein, time is the fourth dimension in this theory. Many years before Einstein claimed this...H.G Wells claimed this, but did not prove it.

I'd quicker say Leonardo Da Vinci was a smarter man than Einstein...simply because of the knowledge he had in the time in which he lived. But he is only smarter scientifically...in whichever field/fields he belonged to. That's what one should say when saying Einstein was the smartest person ever. Life in general is not all about the speed of light and how one can bend space. Scientifically, dealing with physics...he is the smartest man...so far. Not the smartest man that ever lived.

Originally posted by Gorman91
Man if I could talk to Einstein. I'd give him our current understanding of quantum phys and string theory and hope he'd find "the theory to everything"

He was working on one, "the theory to everything", it was his "unified theory" which he died before finishing. He was trying to find a way to mix general relativity and quantum mechanics. Too bad he didn't finish it...

So hypothetically speaking, if there was a craft that could travel at the speed of light,
missions to a planet like mars could take what, 10-20 seconds???

reply to post by maxseamus


It seems to me that whatever speed a photon travels would be the speed of light. So, if under certain circumstances a photon travels faster than 186,000 miles per hour, then the speed of light must be faster than that. Sort of like if you shoot nitrous oxide into the cylinders of a car, it will go faster.

However, in this instance, I think that someone made an error.

Dr Gunter Nimtz, of the University of Koblenz, told the magazine New Scientist: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

www.dailymail.co.uk...

The odds aren't really good for a single violation of a theory that has held up a well as this one.

But, anything is possible, I guess.

[edit on 2007/8/17 by GradyPhilpott]

Near Light Speed Travel is possible. nlspropulsion.net...


Interstellar Travel

If we suppose that we eventually have the ability to harness enormous resources, but do not uncover new laws of physics, then it will always take individual humans years to travel between the stars. The problem is that we can't accelerate faster than our bodies can survive. So, if we assume that the passengers want to experience the journey at an acceleration of 1 g, then how much travel time do they experience on an interstellar journey?

The difficulty that we have to work through is that the traveler isn't in an inertial frame of reference. That is, v keeps changing. The traveler starts at rest and undergoes a constant rate of acceleration g (in the traveler's frame of reference). What is the traveler's velocity (relative to the original frame of reference) at any time?

Let's define some coordinates. The position of the traveler in the original frame of reference is (x, t). (Here I'm using "position" to refer to both space and time.) The velocity of the traveler as measured in the original frame of reference is v. (The traveler sees the same velocity, but has a different distance scale...) The cumulative elapsed time that the traveler has experienced is τ. We want to define the relationship between these coordinates. To do so, we define two additional sets of coordinates: The coordinates in the traveler's inertial frame of reference are (x1, t1). The traveler doesn't really have an inertial frame of reference, since he/she is accelerating constantly, but this is the inertial frame that the traveler would be in if the acceleration were turned off briefly. The traveler is at position x1 = 0. When we envision turning off the acceleration briefly, we will take that moment to correspond to t1 = 0. At that moment, we will also want to consider another set of coordinates (x0, t0) in the Earth's inertial frame of reference. These coordinates are defined by the Lorentz transformation:

This is very close to the formula that we want. We want to know the value of τ when the traveler has made it halfway to the destination, because then the deceleration starts. If the total distance is X, then the total travel time T is given by

(8) X / 2 = (c2 / g) [cosh (0.5 g T / c) – 1]

T = (2 c / g) cosh–1 (1 + 0.5 g X / c2)


If X = 4.3 light-years, then T = 3.6 years. Dozens of stars could be reached in five to six years. In fact, a traveler could even go the Andromeda galaxy in under 29 years if a constant acceleration could be maintained.