Faster-than-light electric currents could explain pulsars

I just came across this article. the first thing what came up was : Mnemeth.

They have created an electric wave that was faster then light !
How cool is that ?

Claiming that something can move faster than light is a good conversation-stopper in physics. People edge away from you in cocktail parties; friends never return phone calls. You just don't mess with Albert Einstein. So when I saw a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting this past January on faster-than-light phenomena in the cosmos, my first reaction was to say, "Terribly sorry, but I really have to go now." Astrophysicists have been speaking of FTL motion for years, but it was always just a trick of the light that lent the impression of warp speed, a technicality of wave motion, or an exotic consequence of the expansion of the universe. These researchers were claiming a very different sort of trick. Dubious though I was, I put their press release in my "needs more thought" folder and today finally got around to taking a closer look. And what I've found is utterly fascinating.

This new data is in favour of the of the electric universe theory, is it not ?

I would really like it when that eventually seems the way to go.
At least I can understand the cosmos a little better.

Which is to say, it looks pretty weird. Not only is the radiation tightly focused in space, it is tightly focused in time--a pulse that originally takes, say, 10 seconds to generate might be squeezed into 1 millisecond as all the electromagnetic wavefronts get jammed together. The temporal focusing causes the radiation to spread out over a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, the focusing provides a degree of amplification, causing the intensity of the radiation to diminish not with the inverse square of the distance but with the inverse distance.

Very interesting. I'm looking forward to future discoveries by this.

You can read it here: www.scientificamerican.com...

Please. enjoy.

~ Sinter.

Truly incredible!

Now the FTL conversations can really begin, lol!

Isn't the universe a grand place, full of grand things....

The thing I cannot understand about the electric universe is the amount of lack of scientists are engaged in it. Is it because they don’t want to drop their theories because they have been taught there whole life a certain style? It just seems weird how the plasma/electric models are not getting looked into more. It has to be more than just money and power.

reply to post by Maddogkull


My thoughts dwell on that same issue.

Who knows... Money is a big issue and stubborn is what we often are.

reply to post by Copperflower

Except that nothing is going faster than light.
The "signal" which is produced is "faster than light" but it does not propagate faster than light. This has also been accomplished using light itself.

What is really interesting is this bit:

In addition, the focusing provides a degree of amplification, causing the intensity of the radiation to diminish not with the inverse square of the distance but with the inverse distance.

reply to post by Phage


Ohh..

I thought it said it lost energy just as fast but because the waves were longer stretched out. It got further in the same time.

reply to post by Phage


I know this is off topic, but you should seriously have a debate with mnemeth on plasma cosmology vs mainstream cosmology. I do not usually read debates, but that would be one I would truley be interested on reading.

reply to post by Sinter Klaas

Think about the domino analogy he uses. The "signal" is like a row of dominoes, each domino is a piece of the whole signal. Depending on how it's done, each domino can be knocked down by the one before it, or independently (by your ornery kid brother, for example). But the entire row doesn't really move at all or if it does, you have to pick up the whole stack and move it (light). In this case the entire signal is a series of pulses of electricity. The only "movement" is within itself, it doesn't go anywhere. But when the entire signal is detected elsewhere (after having gotten there at the speed of light) the "peculiarity" of it can be seen.



[edit on 6/25/2010 by Phage]

reply to post by Phage


Or in other words. This could mean absolutely nothing.

Lets imagine this experiment was build on an huge scale.

Would that light from the electricity, arrive on the other side before a normal light beam would.

It would suggest that light can make it self go a nudge faster. When it is tricked.

So is that saying that it was travelling in a 'wave' as such? Similar to watching a sound wave on an oscilloscope, but with more loss in relation to the surrounding density?

MM

reply to post by Sinter Klaas


That's exactly what they are talking about...sort of. Instead of the wire the experimenters used, the pulses are generated in the magnetic field of a pulsar (very huge). They move faster than light while they are doing it (but remember, "they" aren't really anything, not electrons, not photons). But when they leave the magnetic field as electromagnetic radiation they get crammed together. Think of people running to get onto a slow moving train. They get packed in there but they don't make the train go any faster.



[edit on 6/25/2010 by Phage]

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
I just came across this article. the first thing what came up was : Mnemeth.

They have created an electric wave that was faster then light !
How cool is that ?

This thread is more or less a duplicate of an older thread:

Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

I see the article has a newer date but look at the picture, it's the same thing and the same false claim about faster than light!

This thread is doing much better than that one though, we already have someone pointing out the headline is false about FTL on page 1!

In the other thread, it wasn't until about page 9 that someone pointed out the headline about FTL was false. The first 8 pages are posts by mostly gullible people who believe any headline no matter how stupid. And if they had read the article they would have seen that nothing really travels faster than light, contrary to what the false sensationalistic headlines state.

OK imagine something reached the Earth from the sun in 4 minutes instead of 8 minutes, that would be an imaginary point in space traveling at twice the speed of light.

That's basically what travels faster than light in these experiments, an imaginary point in space, nothing real.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Thanks.

This time I can even say I understand.
With a little help from Phage of course.

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

Thanks.

This time I can even say I understand.
With a little help from Phage of course.

Both of us! Thanks for the excellent explanations, Phage.

It was a short FTL conversation, this one. lol

But good.

Originally posted by Maddogkull
The thing I cannot understand about the electric universe is the amount of lack of scientists are engaged in it. Is it because they don’t want to drop their theories because they have been taught there whole life a certain style? It just seems weird how the plasma/electric models are not getting looked into more. It has to be more than just money and power.

Look at Tesla, ridiculed and mocked by his fellow (so called scientist) and when he was not looking they go ahead and steal his inventions. To state something in wich is considerd impossible in the scientific community , is putting your entire career on the line.

Progress will always be mutch slower with the ideals that those who are different and think differently are simply , well (idiots).

reply to post by Phage


A point source follows the inverse square law. Focussed sources, such as a laser, do not.

Originally posted by LightFantastic
reply to post by Phage

 

A point source follows the inverse square law. Focussed sources, such as a laser, do not.

Why would a "singular" point source follow said law but "multiple" focused point sources not?

reply to post by LightFantastic

A laser is not a "focused" source. It is a coherent beam of electromagnetic energy, a single wave (and it does obey the inverse square rule). There is no indication that this phenomenon results in coherent energy or even directional energy. That's what intrigues me about the statement. It sounds like they may be talking about some sort of continual self amplification as the radiation propagates rather than at the point of emission.


[edit on 6/26/2010 by Phage]

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by LightFantastic

 

A laser is not a "focused" source. It is a coherent beam of electromagnetic energy, a single wave (and it does obey the inverse square rule).

I think that's debatable and depends on the specific conditions of the laser and the measurements.The textbook says lasers don't obey the inverse square law, but under certain conditions they can and do. Under other conditions it can be argued that they don't.



See the "Insight" at the bottom. The key word there is "essentially". if the conditions of use and measurement are such that the "essentially" approximation is valid, that's probably true. But essentially doesn't mean "exactly" so we can certainly find cases where "essentially" parallel isn't close enough to parallel to make this true.

And lasers are not isotropic, one of the conditions listed for the inverse square law to apply.

[edit on 26-6-2010 by Arbitrageur]

reply to post by Arbitrageur

What makes it debatable is the difference between theory and reality. In theory a laser beam is a perfectly parallel beam of energy. In reality, the reality by which it is created, it is not. At a given distance, depending on its wavelength and the diameter of the beam, it behaves as a directional point source just like a spotlight does. A non-isotropic source is still subject to the inverse square law.

Collimation refers to the degree to which the beam remains parallel with distance. A perfectly collimated beam would have parallel sides and would never expand at all. Its divergence angle would be exactly 0. This is impossible except in some (bad) Sci-Fi movies where laser beams appear to go on forever with constant diameter. A laser beam will diverge and even obey the inverse square law when you get far enough away from the laser.

For a coherent monochromatic light source like a laser, divergence is affected mostly by the beam (exit or waist) diameter (wider is better) and wavelength (shorter is better). (A shorter laser generally produces a more divergent beam but this is mostly a result of the typically smaller beam diameter of such lasers, not their size.) This behavior is due to the diffraction limited behavior of wave propagation and cannot be overcome with optics. A very narrow low divergence beam is just not possible. Refer to the diagram: Divergence, Beam Waist, Rayleigh Length but keep in mind that the divergence in the diagram is greatly exaggerated and that the beam waist for most common lasers is actually located inside the resonator or at one of the mirrors.

www.repairfaq.org...

The laser beam that get bounced off of the Moon starts out with a diameter of 3 meters (28.27 square meters). When it gets there it has a diameter of 2km (12.56 square km), 444,444 times over what it started as. Since it is a pretty "fat" beam it takes a while to begin spreading but once it does the amount it spreads is inversely proportional to the distance it travels.

[edit on 6/26/2010 by Phage]