Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

PogMoThoin

Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.

Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really the case, Singleton said.

Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light.

The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists, Singleton said.

"Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves in pulses, but what we don't know is why these pulses are so bright or why they travel such long distances," Singleton said. "What we think is these are transmitting the same way our machine does."

And beyond explaining what has been a bit of a mystery to the astronomical community, Singleton's discovery could have wide-ranging technological impacts in areas such as medicine and communications, he said.

"Because nobody's really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field," Singleton said.

Link to article

Galen

Well if that other bunch of scientists that are working on warp travel then we'll need a communicate with home.

Watch out for the borg on your travels.

watty

This is nothing to do with Internet or Ioffl though.

PogMoThoin

Sorry, meant to post it in the broadband forum as lighthearted hope for the future, its only now when I went looking for it that I realise its in the wrong place, can a mod move it please

oscarBravo

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Anyone see the glaring flaw in this paragraph?

bealtine

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Link to article

I was checking the date and no it's not April 1st...

watty

I'm sorry to say that communication is still limited to speed of light, so it's not the begining of inventing the Ansible or reducing GeoSat communications below 700ms to normal latency.

It's badly reported. Radio waves are just light that wiggles a lot slower. Even Quantum entanglement can't be used to communicate faster than Light.

Imagine you have two shuffled packs of cards. That are identical.
Neither person knows the state of the cards.

One person rearranges them before examining them. The other pack still match.

Have you communicated?
No. Because the remote person can't detect a change. If both people examine the cards, so that the state is known, then the entanglement no longer exists. A "next" state can't be transmitted. You do know exactly what order the OTHER pack of cards was, but you can't now change it because the other person "peeked".

This is a simplified explanation.

If there was a way of knowing your packs order without destroying the entanglement, then indeed you could have INSTANT communications anywhere in the universe.

Either the "cards" are "entangled" and it's random, you don't know the order of the pack, or you know the order and it's not entangled. You can't have both.
As long as you don't know the order of your "pack", the "other pack" can be "reshuffled" and your "pack" instantly matches it.

So quantum entanglement is mind boggling but not very useful in that sense. However quantum mechanics can be used (normal speed fibre optics) and then the mysterious properties can used to tell if an optical message (at conventional speed of transmission) has been intercepted or modified. The explanation of how this works is rather harder. But it does work (tested at least to about 10Mbps and 150km)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography (a bit woolly in places)

E91 protocol: Artur Ekert (1991)

The Ekert scheme uses entangled pairs of photons. These can be created by Alice, by Bob, or by some source separate from both of them, including eavesdropper Eve. The photons are distributed so that Alice and Bob each end up with one photon from each pair.

The scheme relies on two properties of entanglement. First, the entangled states are perfectly correlated in the sense that if Alice and Bob both measure whether their particles have vertical or horizontal polarizations, they will always get the same answer with 100% probability. The same is true if they both measure any other pair of complementary (orthogonal) polarizations. However, the particular results are completely random; it is impossible for Alice to predict if she (and thus Bob) will get vertical polarization or horizontal polarization.

Second, any attempt at eavesdropping by Eve will destroy these correlations in a way that Alice and Bob can detect.

Of course it's said that Bruce Schneier always knows Bob and Alice's secret keys.

dahamsta

OMG, are we going to see a Steorn FTL Internet Magic Radio Box!?

Galen

For that matter where's cold fusion? I was so looking forward to having powered by as little as some rotten apples.

Sponge Bob

This came from Lawrence Livermore lab / Los Alamos ( not from Steorn) and not on April the 1st . There must be something in it !

Galen

Well when the other group of scientists perfect warp travel we can phone home with this technology.

cgarvey

Moved IoffL > Broadband

dahamsta

Spoilsport. Sure those shaggers in BB have no sense of humour.

Oh....

PogMoThoin

Los Alamos is funded by the US treasury, they don't normally make stuff up, the first atomic bomb was created there

Einstien always told us information could not travel faster than the speed of light, but its only a theory, maybe he was wrong and it is possible. Nobody's really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field we've not even thought of, possible applications in the field of communication are endless

Bet the scientist gets the Nobel prize this year

watty

http://erg.ucd.ie/arupa/ratbag_antiphysics_rag95.html

In this paper we set forth new exact analytical superluminal localized solutions to the wave equation for arbitrary frequencies and adjustable bandwidth. The formulation presented here is rather simple and its results can be expressed in terms of the ordinary, so-called “X-shaped waves”. Moreover, by the present formalism we obtain the first analytical localized superluminal approximate solutions which represent pulses propagating in dispersive media. Our solutions may find application in different fields, like optics, microwaves, radio waves, and so on.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVF-49FGY0G-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=945393158&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=7c42936d3b46ecafb40964859aa6a1d9

Superluminal Radio pulses (i.e. faster than speed of light) can be created.

But they don't get from A to B any faster than the speed of light. Yes it's confusing. No, it won't allow FTL communication.

however some people argue an Ansible is possible
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/synt/2006/00000148/00000002/00006231?crawler=true

http://www.wbabin.net/science/faraj8.htm

Nevertheless, there is one feasible experiment, which can settle once and for all this controversial issue. A number of laser reflectors is left on the moon by the Apollo mission. Those reflectors are still in good working conditions. The average time of a round trip for light from the earth to the moon and back is known to a sufficient degree of accuracy, mainly through the use of those laser reflectors. Now if, instead of laser, synchrotron light is used, the current disagreement over superluminality can be decisively resolved. A round trip for timed pulses of the synchrotron in less than half the time of that of the laser is enough to convince everyone that the postulate of constant speed of light is false. The main obstacle, here, is how to get a synchrotron facility and astronomical observatory to collaborate effectively and carry out this crucial experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light

Light spots and shadows

If a laser is swept across a distant object, the spot of light can easily be made to move at a speed greater than c. Similarly, a shadow projected onto a distant object can be made to move faster than c. In neither case does any matter or information travel faster than light.

However, other physicists say that this phenomenon [superluminal photons] does not allow information to be transmitted faster than light. Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, Canada, uses the analogy of a train traveling from Chicago to New York, but dropping off train cars at each station along the way, so that the center of the train moves forward at each stop; in this way, the speed of the center of the train exceeds the speed of any of the individual cars

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



Superluminal Microwave Radio: X-like and Zenneck waves
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v58/i5/p6742_1

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998physics..12012R

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=20945378

Superluminal Microwave source for higher power (doesn't Communicate faster than light though)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/gn8555632x6huv66/


Finally
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible

PogMoThoin

:rolleyes: Ok, maybe its time I played this

watty

Am I a spoil sport? dampening the hopes of 2ms latency Geosyncronous Satellites?

jor el

This has nothing to do with broadband. Physics might be more appropriate.

ChocolateSauce

Sounds like this guy's full of sh!t IMO. Is he seriously trying to separate radio waves and "light" into different phenomena? They're the same thing.

article wrote:

"If you take a laser and shine it on the moon and swing it rather gently, for example, the spot on the moon travels faster than the speed of light,

And this proves the guy is full of it. The light doesn't actually move faster than light, it just appears to; the light barrier isn't actually broken. Anyway, other people have posted fuller refutations, so I'll leave it at that.

dahamsta

You're the first person to say he's full of sh!t though, and that's important.

ChocolateSauce

dahamsta wrote: »

You're the first person to say he's full of sh!t though, and that's important.

Well I'm an ass