S
SpaceKiwi
Guest
Apologies if this subject has already been covered previously, but this story has been on the radio news here most of the day. I'm very interested to hear what you physicist-types make of it all, and whether it's just a gross exaggeration/media beat-up of what's happened.<br /><br />One thought I had when reading a couple of press reports on the 'discovery' ... it is said that the photons which experienced quantum tunnelling would arrive simultaneously with those ones deflected? This is supposedly quicker than would conventionally be expected to be the case? My thought/question is this; if they were travelling FTL, shouldn't they actually arrive earlier than even those photons being deflected?<br /><br />Anyway, here's one of the many articles that seem to be circulating on the Internet today ...<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p><font color="yellow">German Scientists Declare Speed of Light Broken<br />August 16, 2007 10:15 PM<br /><br /><br />A "Macroscopic Violation" of Special Relativity<br /><br /><br />According to modern physics, the speed of light is a fundamental, unbreakable limit. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have done just that, and propelled a stream of photons faster than the speed of light. <br /><br />Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz, Germany, have been researching a phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling. Two prisms are placed together. When a light is shown through the prisms, a detector picks up the light and records information about the photon. However, when the two prisms are separated, Nimtz and Stahlhofen discovered that photons would occasionally "tunnel" between the prisms -- arriving at the detector sooner than should theoretically be possible.<br /><br />The two scientists say they have now tunneled photons "instantaneously" across a distance of up to one meter. Their conclusion, stated in a recent paper, is that the speed limit of special relativity has been vio</font></p></blockquote> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em><font size="2" color="#ff0000">Who is this superhero? Henry, the mild-mannered janitor ... could be!</font></em></p><p><em><font size="2">-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</font></em></p><p><font size="5">Bring Back The Black!</font></p> </div>