This Nonsense Has Gone on Long Enough
Originally posted by Kaytagg
So, anyone debunk this yet?
Yes, pathetic, isn't it? Nine pages of codswallop and a bunch of pseudoscientists jumping up and down in their undershorts going 'Einstein's
rubbish has been disproved' and not understanding a word of what's going on. Very sad indeed.
Never mind, help is on way.
Quoted in the OP:
Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light.
Fiddlesticks. The person who wrote this article doesn't have a clue what he or she is talking about.
rocksolidbrain had it exactly right:
Nothing is moving faster than light, he is only firing the radio pulses very fast through an array of antenna, so that all pulses seem to
arrive at once at the receiver. It does produce some nice effects but its not FTL.
But our friend the OP's reading skills are a match for his knowledge of physics:
Originally posted by warrenb
Your link clearly even states that it is FASTER THAN LIGHT
In fact, what it states is
John Singleton of Los Alamos and his collaborators have built a radio transmitter that incorporates a radio wave source that moves
superluminally (faster than light)...
The
source of the waves is moving faster than light, not the waves themselves. They are still travelling at the speed of light, just as special
relativity predicts.
And the superluminal 'source' isn't an object. It is merely a point in space: specifically, a point along a long strip of dielectric material. The
material itself doesn't move. There is nothing to stop nothing (i.e. a point in space) from moving faster than light.
* * *
Wave Velocity and Group Velocity
As one or two smart folk suggested earlier, the solution of this non-paradox lies in the concept of group velocity, that is the velocity of a
waveform as opposed to a wave. Even for light waves, group velocity can exceed wave velocity without anything having to move faster than light.
But anyone who thinks this makes superluminal communication possible is in for a disappointment.
If a radio wave can be accelerated, maybe light in wave form can be accelerated as well.
This shows the level of ignorance at which the debate is being conducted. Light is electromagnetic energy. So is radio. They are the same thing -
photons. And light (or rather the group velocity of a light pulse)
has been accelerated to values greater than the speed of light in a vacuum.
This post by
visible_villain mentions one such experiment, though
I'm afraid he draws quite the wrong conclusions from it:
Clearly Einstein's work advanced human knowledge only a step or two beyond where Newton left us on a ladder which rises much higher than any
of us can imagine.
Our Villain is mistaken, I'm afraid. What is really going on in the experiment he describes is clearly explained in this
PhysicsWorld article. What is happening in the OP experiment is similar in effect; the
article explains it through the analogy of a sweeping lighthouse beam.
Einstein is not mocked, nor, indeed, rocked:
[The] conclusion that neither energy nor information travels faster than c remains valid, [though] group velocity is not entirely
meaningless. The smooth Gaussian waveform is reshaped by the absorber, leading to a peak at precisely the time predicted by the [superluminal] group
velocity. As for the energy, most of it is absorbed by the medium, and the sensible conclusion is that the transmitted energy comes from the leading
edge of the incident pulse, which never travels faster than the speed of light. [Text in square brackets added by Astyanax.]
A superluminal
group velocity is, frankly, no big deal:
Since the 1980s, various experiments have verified that it is possible for the group velocity of laser light pulses sent through specially
prepared materials to significantly exceed the speed of light in vacuum. However, superluminal communication is not possible in this case, since the
signal velocity remains less than the speed of light. It is also possible to reduce the group velocity to zero, stopping the pulse, or have negative
group velocity, making the pulse appear to propagate backwards. However, in all these cases, photons continue to propagate at the expected speed of
light in the medium.
So there you have it. No energy, no information, no photons moving faster than light. It's all just a scientific sleight of hand.
And nothing to see here except the usual ATS fantasies.
* * *
So...
Originally posted by Kaytagg
Sad thing is, most of the ATS users who read this article are now going to be spewing this as "common knowledge" every chance they get...
Just like the poor fellow earlier on in the thread who thinks the Big Bang hypothesis has been disproved. Bet he read that on ATS, too.