Can these scientist get a job at my local transit and get the buses moving beyond their usual glacial pace?

What took them so long?

Any chance of consistency in terms used?
186,000 miles per second; "placed a metre apart".

#3 Jason. How about 300,000 metres per second, placed a yard apart?

To break the speed of light also means breaking the time barrier. Can we build a real Tardis now??

Who ever said it was impossible. Why, I distinctly recall - yes, 3rd of August, 1978, it was, at 10.23 AM - at the Easthouses/Mayfield Post Office - there was a mob of single mothers (skags with their barstewards in perambulators) waiting for their child allowance money and then; far faster than the speed of light -they were in and out at the off-license spending it all. Ah, them wuz tha crazy daze. Mind you, its only gotten wurse.

The process from here to actual light speed travel will be less than 20 years. Then its Star Trek time for all of us. There will be holograms, human clones and other worlds. Its exciting times, soon we will be visiting other planets and manufacturing cloned life in the image of ourselves. Our firery chariots will be seen landing and taking off in new worlds by our cloned masses. Perhaps in time they will write books about the gods who used govern them and fly around in the sky, perhaps they will worship us. Who knows, but these are exciting times.

Errr...great?

How about doing something of practical use, and which is a REAL challenge? Maybe try to get Scotrail trains to travel at the speed they are supposed to?

"5. Boy Wonder / 3:32am 16 Aug 2007

To break the speed of light also means breaking the time barrier. Can we build a real Tardis now??"

We will never travel in time. Why?

Because if we could, we alweays would have. Or are our future selves not interested in coming back and showing us how to do it?

#9, good point, well made.

And remember all, 3x10^8m/s is the speed of light in a vacuum. A group of sceintists slowed light down to about 34mph (IIRC) in sodium (or rhodium?) cooled to near absolute zero.

Media 1- don't be silly. Light speed travel is still impossible. Humans are different from photons.

In fact the more I think about it, the more I am sceptical of the claims. IIRC, quantum tunnelling occurs because the barrier in question is so thin on the order of a number of atoms thickness, that there is a definite chance that the atom or indeed photon, will exist on the other side. This is because such quantum entities are best thought of as areas of probability. So in this setup, is it clear that there is a definite possibility of photons having a probability of being as much as a metre away from where they were previously? We need a physicist.

I don't know what the big fuss is. I broke the speed of light a couple of years ago.

Photons have zero mass. Therefore it takes no energy to accelerate them. A human on the other hand has mass and requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate to even a small fraction of the speed of light.

Fred- don't you mean that photons have no mass and travel at the speed of light except under exceptional circumstances.

#15- what are you on about?

9

I read your comment next week - boy have you changed your tune! (or you will.... ) ;)

Of course there is the possibility that they haven't actually "accelerated" light but discovered a property of light that had not been observed before.

16. Guthrie: no I didn't mean that; I was referring to this para in the article:

'According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light barrier.'

The 'object' in this case was a photon. The experiment appears to show that the photons that tunnel across the gap travel faster than the speed of light. Furthermore they travel at a speed that is unaffected by the size of the gap!

12. Another thought.

In this experiment they used 33cm microwaves not light, consequently is there more probabilityof e-m radiative transfer or somesuch rather than q-m tunnelling?

Quite frankly, this stuff is way above my head.

Could the North Briton please run an article where Ian Rankin and Lord Foulkes explain it to us mere mortals.

#21- We don't have a plan of the experimental set up, and I don't know if NS has one either, but it would be helpful. From the way it was described, if it had been radiative transfer they would not have seen the effects at faster than light speed, and also any change in frequencey would have been noticed as well.

#20- my point regarding the acceleration to light speed is that it is unnecessary if your using a photon, surely?
It would be interesting to compare this article to the New Scientist one, and see which made more sense. Unfortunately I am not near anywhere that sells the NS, so few outlets do these days.

Is it true that light has duality? That is, it travels as waves and as particles?

25. Dave: yes.

25, 26: more at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality

The article quotes an optics expert at University of Toronto who says the results don't violate relativity; it's 'just a question of interpretation.'

If it's that much up in the air....

On slow light:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
This is an introduction to the topic. I still don't see how the photons are supposed to have tunnelled over a metre in distance. Or rather, it seems to me that such an occurence would have a very low probability of happening, but the question is, is it so low that it is very unlikely to happen, or is this actually happening all the time in the everyday world?

Reminds me of the SF FTL drive whereby the ship's probability was eqealised over the entire universe, then brought together again at a different point.

#9 - unless, of course, time travel becomes possible only forwards.

How can light have duality?

How do you know the CIA hasn't re-written the properties of light in Wikipedia?

Light is said to have duality (discrete particle and continuous wave) because some (genuine) physical events could only be explained if light was a discrete particle, while other (equally genuine) physical events could only be explained if light was a continuous wave.

Light is a fascinating subject especially at the quantuum level, as I discovered too late in life.

Type in "duality of light" or 'light +quantuum'. You will find there are some 'idiot' guides available, I know because I have read some.

Hmmmmm Could it be that the slower photons actually had undetectible mass, appearing slower than the speed of light and the "tunneling speedsters" were actually travelling at the speed of light? Interesting point of perspective.

#18 I was thinking that too. So they observed a couple photons traveling faster than the rest. Maybe they didn't notice it before. I don't think matter can hold together at the speed of light. (at least this is my understanding). I would like to send some politicians at the speed of light.

Anyone know if the light waves or particles have a specific frequency and does it change as it passes the speed of light? Also, can light travel below the speed of light?

#9 von-Scharnhorst,
But there must have been a first time traveller right? And he can't go back and alter anything or he'll change his own future..??

It seems that every few years some crackpot claims to have broken the speed of light, only later to be amended or creatively reinterpreted (on at least three separate occasions within the past decade). Call me a pessimist (or a physicist), but I think this headline is more of the same Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion media hyped cargo cult science — that of which the late Richard Feynman had repeatedly warned. And unfortunately, I believe that this type of collapse of scientific method will mark the 21st century: bad lab technique, a poor understanding of basic principles, lack of peer review and instant media hype.

Of course, I would love to be wrong ... because it would mean ushering in an entirely new age of science.

I'm putting my money on it being crackpot science.

(Future college students: It's best you scratch this university off your list)

-W

-37- but when you travel in time it makes no difference to go backward or forward you are going to screw up an infinity of stuff anyway, since time is infinite whats a few years backward...so no one will ever time travel obviously they would have figured it out.

There we have it (maybe): the universe is nonlocal. bell's theorem no longer applies. hidden variables reality is possible?

NEC corporation has made light (photons) go up to 250 x's the speed of light the French made sub atomic particles go slightly faster at their smasher and I've seen articles were scientists had made light go backwards. You guys are news that is not that big of a deal. David Sereda has a theory on faster than light travel and has done videos on UFO's with Dan Akroyd you can see them on youtube for free. His theory is called the galaxy clock I think next week I'll get his book and review his theory cause when I went to his seminar on UFO's it made absolute sense to me. By the way dark matter may be dark because it is vibrating at a speed faster than light so light won't bounce off of something that it can't hit. Thats my theory anyway. You might want to keep up on the latest top level scientific knowledge compiled in the book divine cosmos at divinecosmos.com free online. Read the chapter about microclusters.

"Experts do the 'impossible' by breaking speed of light"

So I guess its going to be more taxpayers' money now to fix it again.

Are photons not these seat things in student's flats that change into beds?

Dunno how they can move quickly!

Sorry for being disrespectful, but its has no relevance or useful application.

I saw this a couple of days ago.
But I won't hear about it for some time yet.

#7

You are describing the works of Ken McCleod, writer of the Fall Revolution sci fi novels !

Go read

I understand about the Quantum approach to making photons travels so fast.
But what I really want to know is this:
- Will defeating Relativity and interfering with the Time/Space contiuum ensure that my can of Miller 'Lite' magically refills itself?

I am going for quick 'quark' down the offie now

I am travelling at the speed of light right now. I can't tell the difference.

This information is Years old!!!!!
I saw this same experiment in a PBS Documentary 2005... Come peeps get your BS in order!!!!!

I'm sorry, but I too have become disenchanted with "science" as of late. Maybe it's just the media hype as one reader said. But it seems that more and more "fact" is really just theory built upon theory, until people are just fooling themselves.

Is 1 meter really enough to accurately determine the speed of a few microscopic particles? If you do the math, that would be like trying to clock cars travelling at 100 miles per hour, with only 1/100th of a millimeter for reference, since light is travelling about 100,000 times faster. Also, the car is the size of a speck of dust.

Does anybody else think maybe our human measurement is the anomoly?

Fred Bloggs: If photons had no mass, they wouldn't be affected by black holes.

Time for a brew I think.

49# Everything has mass. Photons must have, how else could a solar sail work.

Now for my brew

Interesting!

But the post on Firefox ('A Campaign to block Firefox users?') seems to be more popular on Slashdot today as compared to this 'breaking' news item. Does this symbolize the changing interests of the current generation?

To #6

That speed was exceed, nay, almost doubled by the folks who went for those $2,000 debit cards after Katrina. Nobody had an inkling that humans could move so fast; and through kneedeep water, at that.

Light is the medium of communication between particles. We cannot observe photons. We can observe the changes only.

The behavior of photons, or changes we observe and blame on 'photons', give us our perceptions of space and time.

I wonder how many times photons have "misbehaved" and we have thrown out the results because they did not fit in or were not possible.

#49, Photons have no rest-mass. If they could be stopped, they would weigh nothing. All particles with 0 rest mass travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. All particles with some rest mass are restricted to less than C.

Traveling photons have a small amount of mass, the amount of which is described by one of the theories of Relativity. Basically, energy weighs something. The more energy you have, the more you weigh. You, personally have a huge amount of energy. If we could turn you into light you would be extremely bright.

Massive particles derive a significant part of their mass from the motion (inertia) of the quarks which make them up. Much of the rest apparently comes from the Higgs boson.

(Disclaimer: I am not a physicist - I just talk like one on the web.)

What about the Aspect Experiment? They "proved" that things must be able to travel faster than light, or reality doesn't exist. Maybe this all has to do with Boltzmann Brains and being inside the giant supercomputer of an advanced creature...

55# I don't think Mass and weight are the same. In space an item will have mass but not weight for instance, but under gravitational influences everything that is has a weight.
In space there are no datems to calculate weight from.
The hightrer the gravitational influence the heavier the item becomes.
On the moon we are 1/3 the weight we are on Earth.

In a Black hole we would be vastly heavier.

It is the exceptionaly high gravity of Black holes or Galaxcies that bend light. If light can be bent in this way then the protons of light must have mass and therefore weight under gravitational influences.

I am sceptical of the article and I would like to have independant confirmation of the discovery.