Light Breaking Speed of Light?

It's pretty obvious that the problem is the way we are modeling things is flawed when it gets down to a fundamental level like this.

What I think is happening is that we arte trying to describe something that isn't a wave or particle and hence doesn't quite fit either.

Now, most people state that we live in a four dimensional universe and that the dimensions are length, breadth, width and time. This however doesn't allow for matter and energy so while I agree that we live in a 4 dimensional universe the dimensions are actually matter, energy, space and time and that it is the limit of our mathematics that results un us needing three numbers to describe a position within space.

Further we know that energy and matter are really different manifestations of the same thing and ultimately we will find that time and space are also related to matter, energy and each other in a similar and elegantly simple and fundamental way.

So, what I am saying is, we are trying to describe something that is fundamental to the universe and is not a particle or a wave and that we don't really comprehend what it actually is. As a result of our limited mathematics and the fact we are trying to describe something we cant properly comprehend we end up with this duality problem where light sometimes acts like a wave and sometimes a particle.

Hi Masu.

"Further we know that energy and matter are really different manifestations of the same thing and ultimately we will find that time and space are also related to matter, energy and each other in a similar and elegantly simple and fundamental way."

The problem that I have with your concept is that space and time are entities through which things like mass and energy can move and birds can fly around in. Hence we call them dimensions or coordinates or whatever.

Mass and energy are the occupants of the spacetime dimensions and they influence them, so it is hard for me to think of mas/energy as dimensions. That spacetime and energy are interlinked and entwined, I agree to. String theory and other quantum gravity ideas attempt to solve the 'connections'.

Jorrie

As things move thru space-time, space time also moves thru them, thru all of the subatomic spaces within.Perhaps this internal movement can create eddy currents within space time, similar to water flowing around an object in it's path.Perhaps the path of space time can be made more "turbulent" by speeding up the angular velocity of the prisms and receivers, and careful selection of the crystalline structure on a nano scale.The motion thru space time on earth is very mixed; the earth is rotating on it's axis, orbiting around the sun, the sun is orbiting the galaxy, the galaxy is moving in it's local group, the local group is moving, etc. I would be curious to see the effect of high-speed angular motion on the results of the experiment:More or less photons passing thru?

HTRN

Hi HTRN.

The problems with uncertainty in the quantum world reminds me of this quote:

"Half of what we know about physics is wrong. The trouble is, we don't know which half." -Gary Skouson

Jorrie

We all know that space/time behaves differently on the quantum level.Perhaps space time becomes so twisted and convoluted as it occupies the spaces between matter on the subatomic level that a micro-wormhole actually forms.

Perhaps different crystals can enhance this effect.(Can you say DILITHIUM?)

Or, perhaps,as I previously speculated, that a select few of the photons have special properties that have not yet been defined.This has been the case with electrons,and has spawned a whole new field, called SPINTRONICS, where the spin of the electron is used to store information, whereas in the past only the electron itself was used.There is so much more that we don't know than we do know about our universe.We are like ants in a desert, and we tend to think everything is made of sand.

Actually, quantum physics has a very good description of how tunneling works, as well as why it works. The theory gave rise to the creation and invention of the tunneling diode, which was developed to take advantage of just this capability of matter.

Hi HiTekRedNek,

• This has been the case with electrons,and has spawned a whole new field, called SPINTRONICS, where the spin of the electron is used to store information, whereas in the past only the electron itself was used.

Actually we have been using the direction of the spin of an electron to store information for over 60 years now. Any medium that uses a magnetic field as in magnetic disk drives and the many variations of magnetic tape, use the polarity of the electrons spin to store data. It is however done on a macro level where huge numbers of electrons are aligned in a similar direction.

There has however been some toying with the alignment of electron spin in crystals for over 30 years where it is one bit per atom, but I havn't heard anything about this for ages so I have no idea where it got to or even if it is still being developed. If anybody can update me I would appreciate it.

Hi Masu,

Check out this link...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics

Once mankind thought the earth was flat,that the earth was the center of the universe,and later, that the Milky Way was the entire universe.To exceed the speed of sound would be fatal to anyone attempting it.All of these have been proven false as our technologies advanced.The sound barrier was broken, and I am sure that in the future, a work-around will be found for the speed of light barrier.

If you want to see the speed of light broken, just give mention of chores to a teenager and see how fast he disappears.

HTRN

Hi HiTekRedNek

• Once mankind thought the earth was flat,that the earth was the center of the universe,and later, that the Milky Way was the entire universe.To exceed the speed of sound would be fatal to anyone attempting it.All of these have been proven false as our technologies advanced.The sound barrier was broken, and I am sure that in the future, a work-around will be found for the speed of light barrier.

I was hoping somebody would bring that up. Yes it is true that people said that is was impossible to travel faster than a whole stack of speed over the last couple of centuries. However, there was no scientific basis to those beliefs and they were more like myths that had been spread about and become part of basic belief just because they were around for so long.

As to the breaking of the sound barrier, whilst breaking the speed of sound is indeed very hard to achieve and can truly be interpreted as a barrier, there were numerous items both natural and man made that exceeded the speed of sound. By the time Chuck Yeager was flying his X1 man made objects like bullets and the V1 rocket were exceeding the speed of sound by factors in excess of 2. Naturally you have meteors, particles from volcanic eruptions and even the planets and the moon in their orbits.

So, any aeronautical engineer, scientist, physicist, or anybody for that matter, that had even a relatively cursory glance at the world around them would have seen that there were many objects that were traveling considerably faster than the speed of sound.

Light on the other hand is a whole different ball game. Firstly there is a well tested theory in place that not only states the speed of light is fundamental constant and upper limit to speed throughout the universe but explains why. So far finding something that can exceed the speed of light has proved somewhat difficult. When you go and look closely at the claims that somebody has detected hyper light speed there always seems to be something dodgy going on.

I do hope the speed of light can be exceeded but so far it has stood up pretty well to examination so I am not going to hold my breath waiting.

Hi Masu.

"I do hope the speed of light can be exceeded but so far it has stood up pretty well to examination so I am not going to hold my breath waiting."

I guess our only glimmer of hope is the hypothetical tachyons that I've Blogged on lately. They are at least not (yet) ruled out by theory.

The effort of trying to understand tachyons left me exhausted, so I'm taking a week off, going into the African Bush...

Jorrie

Hi Jorrie

This is emphatically not my area of expertise. However, my readings suggest something along the following lines:

Tachyons are not light anyway (so not directly relevant to the topic).
. Nevertheless, the effect would be the same if could we use them to control a light source so that it came on before direct light could reach that source; unfortunately, the early workers established in principle that, although a tachyonic field would travel faster than light, it could not transfer information at greater than the speed of light.

To me, that would be a difficult paradox to start with; I think the out is that, in most moderate-dimensional string formulations, the (random??) formation time of a tachyonic field is long compared with its duration - it (always) travels faster than light, but there's a delay before the field starts to propagate, and it condenses out before it can get ahead of light of that originated at the same time.
. When I say "most moderate-dimensional string formulations", I believe the only well-known tachyonic field that has not (yet?) been shown to be unstable in this way is the "closed string tachyon in the 26-dimensional bosonic string theory". However, the proof that "tachyons cannot transfer information at faster than the speed of light" is deemed to be general - and therefore cover this case as well.

Enjoy your week off - and avoid undesirable creatures and rapacious fungi
(Personally, I'd find just getting there and back more exhausting than a week of reading - and that's only partly because I'm starting from the wrong continent).

Fyz

Hi Fyz. "Enjoy your week off - and avoid undesirable creatures and rapacious fungi
"

Thanks and yes, I did succeed to avoid the undesirables and find the desirables, e.g.

Will have to reorient completely to start thinking quantum strangeness again. I read John Gribben's "In search of superstrings", but, perhaps due to the influence of 'Big 5 territory', I did not take in too much of it.

Jorrie

Taking a photon and subjecting it to a "wave", does it represent a sinusoidal variation of the photon's energy within the wavelength or its geometrical oscillations about a mean position? In either case, would not the photon be "exceeding" C (except at the "start", two "transition" points and the "end" of the wave, where it equals C) which would then represent the average rather than the "instantaneous" state of nergy or velocity?Pardon my ignorance.

Fyz, Jorrie, Enq Mind, et al.;

I know so very very little on this matter. I am almost embarassed to chime in, but well that has never stopped me before.

My question is what of light accelerators? Are there such beasts? I gather from the statements no. (i have read every word written here)

I began some modest research before posting and saw there is some interesting material out there. Such as this (highly) questionable document.....here....(there is a .pdf link mid page) as well as others.

So please clear it up for this layman.

We absolutely cannot view light travelling at faster than c .

or

at times it can be viewed (measured) at a real time of faster than c?

Thanks in advance.

cr3

I think the link is referring to light (I assume laser light) being used to accelerate subatomic particles.

Agreed

Fyz

hi C_Rummel3, you wrote: "We absolutely cannot view light travelling at faster than c."

Correct, remembering that c is the speed of light in free space (hypothetical vacuum, far from gravity sources). Particles can break the 'speed of light' in optical media, but that 'speed of light' is slower than c due to the positive refractive index of the medium. This happens when a particle enters a medium at a speed higher than the speed of light in the medium. It cannot be decelerated to below that speed instantly, so for a short while it exceeds the local speed of light, before it has lost enough energy. The loss in energy is given off as Cherenkov radiation.

I'm not too sure what happens with negative refractive index materials, though... Somebody?

Jorrie

Jorrie,

Here's some further food for thought regarding things that can go from here to there without breaking the cosmological speed limit...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GOING from here to there doesn't always mean passing through points in between, despite what philosophers might say. Quantum objects have more mysterious ways to get around.

Masum Rab and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia used quantum theory to explore how waves of atoms can move between three boxes separated by impenetrable barriers. Ordinarily, a quantum particle starting at one end will tunnel through the first barrier, move into the middle box, and spend some time there before tunnelling through the second barrier to reach the third box.

But not always. Under some conditions, Rab's team found, particles can skip the middle box. The team built a computer model of the movement through a Bose-Einstein condensate, an ultracold cloud of thousands of atoms, through three such boxes. By slowly changing the strength of the two barriers, they could make the waves in the middle box cancel each other out. As a consequence, only a few atoms ever occupied the middle box (www.arxiv.org/abs/0709.0985). "They go from the first to the third box," says Rab, "without transiting through the middle."

The effect, the physicists point out, is distinct from quantum teleportation, which destroys an object in one position, while creating a replica of it at another. This technique, dubbed "transport without transit", involves real movement of particles, and may be useful for controlling matter waves - quite aside from confounding philosophers.

From issue 2623 of New Scientist magazine, 29 September 2007, page 17

"Jumping the middle region": it's a valid interpretation. But what is being described doesn't sound different in substance from a minimum in an optical interference pattern - and I don't think that would surprise anyone much.

Fyz

What I got from the article is that the Bose-Einstein condensate is manipulated in the center box such that any particle entering would be cancelled out - they're using the condensate to dampen waves to nothingness. So, a particle that appears in box three had to make the trip without traveling through box two, because if it entered box two it would be lost forever. Or something like that.

Mathematically, I don't think that look very different; rather more complex, but substantially a local zero due to specific dimensions & c...

Wow and Wow again! That is waaayy cool! Thanks Vermin for taking the time to post. You have made my day!

Yeah, I know. That's pretty sad, huh?

cr3

Wouldn't negative refractive index would just mean propagation in the reverse direction? In principle refractive index can take any finite value - it just represents c/phase_velocity, after all. What is less widely understood is that local group velocity can also (at least theoretically) take any value - so long as either attenuation or "input delay" are such that information (or energy) do not transfer overall at greater than c

Fyz

Hi Fyz. "Wouldn't negative refractive index just mean propagation in the reverse direction?"

Yep, I think you're right, perhaps just more correctly stated at a negative angle rather than in the reverse direction. I confused negative refractive index with less than unity refractive index, which naively could look like faster than light information transfer rates. As you pointed out, it does not happen in practice.

Jorrie

Perhaps light is like other forms of energy,in that it's velocity is limited by the medium thru which it travels."Free space" is not really empty, and can be considered a medium of transport for light and other forms of energy.

When approaching the speed of sound in air,at a critical point, air ceases to flow around, but instead is pushed in front of the object.A sonic"crack" or boom is heard.

IF it were ever possible to exceed the speed of light in a "vacuum" one would have to "push" space time ahead of their Tachyon ship, and this I assume, would create a heck of a shock wave in space time. If any alien species is currently using this humanly impossible technology, perhaps we will detect a "PHOTONC BOOM" as they go into hyperdrive.Perhaps generating some of the Gamma Ray Bursts that seem to come from everywhere in the universe? Gamma rays travel in very short curves, so they should not be able to travel long distances, but yet they appear to.

We live on the outskirts of our galaxy, and we are the country bumpkins compared to possibly much older civlilizations.We are still traveling in horse-drawn carriages; our subluminal transporataion modes of travel.We may be nothing more than an ant hill, not worthy of interest, much less contact and idea exchange.

Judging by nature on this planet, I am not so sure that another species would nescessarily be benevolent.We certainly have not been to our fellow inhabitants.

Gamma rays travel in very short curves,

Huh? What does that mean?

Tacky-yawns are the most theoretical of particles - I think they were originally dreamed up by a science fiction writer.

If you want to see a photonic boom, I suggest you Google Čerenkov radiation. Wikipedia has an article on this - here.

Some sc- fi writers have predicted things several hundreds of years beyond the actual discoveries.Sure, "Tacky-yawns" are theoretical and cannot be detected by any current technology, and the current consensus is that they never will.

Kinda like the 4 minute mile.No one thought it could be broken, until it was.Then many people beat it.Just shows how many people can do the impossible when pre-conceived walls are torn down.

Do not let your imagination be limited by current theory.The universe is unlimited in more ways than we can imagine.

Hi HiTekRedNek,

· Kinda like the 4 minute mile.No one thought it could be broken, until it was.Then many people beat it.Just shows how many people can do the impossible when pre-conceived walls are torn down.

That may be true but there was no scientific basis behind the statement that a human could run a mile in under 4 minutes, it was just something people believed was impossible.

Super-light speed on the other hand has a hell of a lot of confirmed scientific background behind its impossibility and that makes it a completely different kettle of fish.

First, that is a fallacious argument. Just because one limit was broken does not mean that any other limit can be broken.

Also, I don't limit my imagination. I am simply steering away from the most improbable. To propel yourself through space-time on a rocket implies that you can deal with infinite mass. That's rather unrealistic. On the other hand, I imagine that there may be some other form of transportation - tunneling, perhaps. How about folding space or short-circuiting the continuum.

To remain glued to propulsion is like the chimp in the forest knowing that one cannot fly, much less fly faster than the speed of sound!

Hi HiTekRedNek,

• IF it were ever possible to exceed the speed of light in a "vacuum" one would have to "push" space time ahead of their Tachyon ship, and this I assume, would create a heck of a shock wave in space time.

Sort of, except it would be fairly cataclysmic as the mass of the craft passed through being infinite to beyond and therefore generating an infinite gravitational field/distortion of the space time that sucked the entire universe and formed a universe sucking black hole.

There may indeed be intelligent life throughout the universe and I would certainly not be surprized but whether or not they are close enough to make contact with any other intelligent life is another question entirely.

Hi HTRN, you wrote:

"IF it were ever possible to exceed the speed of light in a "vacuum" one would have to "push" space time ahead of their Tachyon ship, and this I assume, would create a heck of a shock wave in space time."

The idea of the hypothetical 'warp drive' is to not push the spaceship through space, but rather let space flow and take the ship with it. There is then no breaking of the speed of light through space. I'm not sure if this will create a gigantic 'gravitational shock wave' or not.

We have speculated on warp drives before in this Blog entry.

Jorrie

And remember that the fully developed Star Trek model of Warp-drive has nothing to do with anti-matter itself. Star fleet just prefers to get the energy to create a warp field by using matter and anti-matter. The Romulans, on the other hand, prefer to use a captured singularity to produce the energy to create a warp field. I think the Klingons use something different...

How much you want to bet that this spell-checker is geeky enough to have the proper spelling for Star Trek characters and terms?!

'Perhaps light is like other forms of energy,in that it's velocity is limited by the medium thru which it travels."Free space" is not really empty, and can be considered a medium of transport for light and other forms of energy."

You bet you are right on the button!!This is what it is.Space is not empty at all-Nature abhors a vacuum.The universe is filled with particles.For the sake of a "Kick off" assumption, I presume that the particles are spherical, having "ideal" elasticity, and being subjected to oscillations of all sorts (Unlimited numbers of frequencies and unlimited number of wavelengths) some of which we are able to detect and recognise as HEAT,LIGHT,SOUND,MAGNETISM,X-RAYS,Radio waves, RADIO-ACTIVITY, GRAVITATION and so many physical phenomena.It's all a very simple universe with OSCILLATIONS BEING PROPAGATED THROUGH THE PARTICULATE MATTER.

The particles agglomerate (Coalesce) into spherical particles of larger sizes to fill any space available and so we find the kind of arrangement pictured alongside.

With this concept, ALL physical phenomena are perfectly explicable.

You've been smoking that happy weed again havn't you!