Faster-than-light pulsar radio waves found (heavy implications)

I have no idea whether this has become a thread or not. I'm sure if it has, the mods will be all over it and justifiably so. However, with this recent discovery of RF frequencies breaching the speed of light waves, I can't help but to think that HAARP technologies might be getting an overhaul in the future and an upgrade in their capabilities. This is very interesting indeed.

Here's a snippet from the source...

Astrophysicists working out of the University of Texas at Brownsville have been studying an interesting pulsar about 10,000 light years away from us (a pulsar is a highly magnetic, spinning corpse of a dead star). Over the course of three days of monitoring, radio waves emitted from the pulsar seem to have been traveling faster than the speed of light.

You might have heard that faster-than-light travel is impossible. This is not entirely true -- there are a couple of catches which allow for F.T.L velocities. One such catch, as originally proposed by Mr. Einstein, is that something can travel faster than light if it does not contain information. This physical law has been observed on Earth in experiments, but with this pulsar (if confirmed), this is the first time this sort of thing has been observed off of our planet. What does or does not constitute information in this context however, is the subject of both rigorous study and debate.

Source...This is very important information people. And I'm sure that the military is already learning how to harness this...

www.neoseeker.com...

The FTL restriction only applies to physical matter(as far as we know). radio waves, having no actual mass, can go faster than light if they are abused enough.

see;

www.abovetopsecret.com...

but good catch, in any case.

how did they manage to monitor this? Must be very tricky to do that...
I have heard many new types of physics acknowledges FTL but of course not as quickly as sci fi authors...

Originally posted by Kokatsi
how did they manage to monitor this? Must be very tricky to do that...
I have heard many new types of physics acknowledges FTL but of course not as quickly as sci fi authors...

That's a good question and one that I have no answer for. This is quite new to me as well.

Superluminal, or faster than light, speeds are associated with anomalous dispersion, which is a process in which the refractive index of a medium increases with the wavelength of light passing through it. If a light pulse (consisting of a group of light waves at different wavelengths) passes through such a medium, the group velocity of the pulse can increase to a velocity greater than any of the waves within the pulse, but the energy of the pulse still travels at the speed of light, which means information is transmitted in accordance with Einstein's theory.

www.physorg.com...

The key phrase here is the "group velocity" of the pulse can increase to a velocity greater than c

The group velocity is often thought of as the velocity at which energy or information is conveyed along the wave. In most cases this is true, and the group velocity can be thought of as the signal velocity of the waveform. In some unusual circumstances, called cases of anomalous dispersion, the rate of change of the index of refraction with respect to the wavelength changes sign, in which case it is possible for the group velocity to exceed the speed of light

the point is this only happens in certain mediums and the signal velocity still remains ≤ c

Since the the signal velocity is the velocity at which information actually travels this does not make superluminal transmissions of information possible



[edit on 22-1-2010 by constantwonder]