He says that the pulses we see are "light booms" -- shock waves made by a source moving faster than light, rather like the sonic boom created by a
supersonic plane when it breaks the sound barrier.
www.spacedaily.com...
Anyone know where I can get a hold of the actual peer reviewed papers regarding this? ...because that analogy above seems highly suspect upon casual
glance. What exactly is the outside source which pushes this "photonic boom"? Photons? A sonic boom travels at the speed of sound, but does not
exceed the speed of sound. The energy travels at the same speed, but it's highly compressed because the object exceeding the sonic barrier is
traveling at or faster than the speed of sound. Any noise it outputs is compounded in the same area which in which sound waves are already present.
A casual search on Google didn't turn up any credible scientific literature or publication - just news sites, blogs, and the like. Mostly just
buzzwords and pseudo-scientific jargon.
So far as I know, the speed of light is still yet to be exceeded. The only way to travel faster than light, is to slow light down to a manageable
speed. Forgive me if this has been addressed already, but I'm highly skeptical of the claim. ... I do, however, vaguely recall reading an article a
few years back claiming that a specialized sensor at the end of fiber optic line will register when light is present before the photons actually reach
it... but it wasn't known at the time if it could be used to improve communications technology since no information was actually transmitted.
The only thing that can move faster than light in a vacuum is the vacuum itself. I.E. The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. This
is why some distant galaxies can be 20+ billion some light years away, yet the universe itself is only about 14 billion years old. The visible
universe is only a small segment of the universe which is still close enough to us for light to reach. As the universe continues to expand and
accelerate it's expansion - eventually some galaxies may "disappear" as the space the light is traveling in is expanding away from us faster than
light can travel through it.
[edit on 30-6-2009 by Lasheic]