German Scientists have discovered a way to travel faster than the speed of light

[Scott]

If you were stationary when you did it, you'd implode.

[flappist]

So after reading all this I now understand:

a) If you travel faster than light then you cannot see in the same way that when you travel faster than sound you cannot hear.
b) Time must constant and the concept of relative time is anathema despite absolute proof being demonstrated on many occasions by many different persons.

Relativity:

If you are walking down the aisle of a 747 is flight how fast are you going? To those in the 747 you are going slow, to those on the ground you are going fast.
The axiom that you cannot exceed the speed of light is more accurately stated that "You cannot perceive a velocity differential between two objects that exceeds the speed of light".

Object A goes north at 100km/h, object B goes south at 100km/h, relative speed 200km/h.
Object A goes north at 0.6 times the speed of light, object B goes south at 0.6 times the speed of light. What is the relative velocity?
No it is not 1.2C, nor is it 1.0C. It is different depending on what it is passing through at the time.

Then there is the quantam component. If a GT Falcon is seen at a point at 2PM and is seen at another point 100km/h away at 3pm how fast did it go to get there? 100km/h?
What if the road was actually 170km long with lots of bends?
What if 100km is the road length and the two points are 1km apart in a straight line?

This can be quite complex stuff..............

http://forum.physorg.com/

P.S. I do not think there is a section in it on modding FPVs........

[Scott]

Originally Posted by flappist

P.S. I do not think there is a section in it on modding FPVs........

Only the speed of the money leaving our wallets.

[ILLaViTaR]

Originally Posted by mik

and if you farted at the speed of light the friction would ignite your fart and you`d burn yourself

......wtf?

[Nikked]

Someone mention time travel, Valeriy Polyakov, russian cosmonaut apparently came back to earth somthing like 0.005 of a second ahead of time because of the time he spent orbiting earth at a faster rate then earths orbit.

[asusdragon]

traveling at the speed of light will one day be possible but will be a few hundred years off me thinks,
as for moving object at the speed of light humans have done it i remeber reading it somewhere, somewhere in europe or something have done it. so it is possible

[tapeworm]

Love this stuff 'What man can imagine, man can do' , I reckon this saying definately rings true. Hey it's gold looking at the night sky and thinking u could be witnessing a star or event that happened when he dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
Read a crazy UFO Theory novel a year ago. The author (proffessor of some sorts) theorizes that we were visited thousands of years back by intelligent life which are now interpreted 'gods'. Ancient texts speak of 'gods' being 700 hundrered years of age etc. Using the speed of light quirks mentioned above he explains how this could be possible with advanced beings who have mastered time travel. lol.
Such facinating stuff the working of space, time, and theoies cahllenging the mind and conciousness, where does space end etc, also nothing more frustrating than having the curiosity but not the IQ to fully understand these things. Gotta love SBS doco's for this sorta gear.

[irlewy86]

Nothing can travel at the speed of light that has mass. Only photons.

That was the rest of Einstiens theory.

[monkeydog]

Originally Posted by AUIIForte

Ok ok. So with that theory that you believe in, it means that If could travel faster then the speed of light, I could outrun light it self and not be able to see anything..

Just say I am on a nice big foot ball oval and there is a football placed on the ground on one side of the oval. I am standing in front of it, looking at it. Now I start running backwards faster then the speed of light (but still looking at the ball)... Does that mean the football disappeared out of my vision because the 'reflected light' that gave me the vision of the football cant catch up to me?

GTP006, what thoughts do you have about my other post about the mirror?

No, you just wouldn't see yourself, because you have removed that light from that space, you would still see the football, because the light between you and it always existed uninterupted. Put your hand infront of a lazer, can you see the lazer still? no, move your hand closer, can you see it? no. At no stage did the light exist behind your hand for you to see, even if you moved your hand towards the light beyond the speed of light.

If you didn't run in a straight line you'd see yourself, in places, because you've allowed the light to travel uninterupted.

[AUIIForte]

^^^
I think you believe too much in THEORIES then in REALITY. (sorry)

[Mental]

Originally Posted by AUIIForte

So you're saying that if I was to look at my self in a mirror that was, lets say 50 meters away, and I moved around, I would see my reflection move 'after' me?

If you had the ability to measure time in nano seconds, yes you would see a delay in your reflection. And just so were not confused here, that is a FACT not Theory.

[monkeydog]

What theory is that? I'm not too sure where you're coming from. If light isn't reflected it is absorbed and converted; that's fact.

[schnoods]

Typical.

It took German scientists to get Nasa on the Moon and now it'll take german scientist to go faster than the speed of light. Whats next?

A cure for the Common Cold?

[TUF_302]

Originally Posted by Van D

How would they get there before leaving?

Id say rather quickly lol!

Also, the worlds sharpest object is a fart, it goes strait threw your pants and doesnt leave a hole or tear!

[flappist]

Originally Posted by irlewy86

Nothing can travel at the speed of light that has mass. Only photons.

That was the rest of Einstiens theory.

Well is a photon energy or a particle? If it is energy why does it have a finite unit and if it is a particle then it must have mass........

Light cannot escape a black hole because of its gravity. Gravity acts on mass.

Try again......

[irlewy86]

A photon is neither energy nor particle. It is a photon. It has no mass.

[flappist]

Originally Posted by irlewy86

A photon is neither energy nor particle. It is a photon. It has no mass.

If it has no mass then it cannot have inertia. Please explain solar sails?

[FPV GT]

The arguement goes something like this:


"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," say Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't though of that" and promply vanishes in a puff of logic.


Regards
Slartibartfast
Magrathean Designer of Planets

[irlewy86]

Originally Posted by flappist

If it has no mass then it cannot have inertia. Please explain solar sails?

Yeah sure, while I'm at it would you like me to explain the theory of evoloution. How about sub atomic theory.

Photons have no mass at rest. (this is high school physics by the way, proposing that photons have mass at rest is highly theoretical and totally unproven) :

[new2ford]

They now need to work out how to stop in time. There's enough space junk in our skies without it being full of Germans who've overshot on the Cologne to Frankfurt run.

[monkeydog]

At least when kids need to go to the toilet on trips and parents go 'you should have gone before you left', it's not too late.

[Bundy]

Its true enough alright I learnt about it years ago proving that RF energy in a waveguide (Radar Theory) does infact travel faster then the speed of light. Its only possible whilst the engery is inside the waveguide and at a high enough level ie 10kw or more.

It like Flappist said it all comes back to mass and inertia.

[flappist]

Originally Posted by irlewy86

Yeah sure, while I'm at it would you like me to explain the theory of evoloution. How about sub atomic theory.

Photons have no mass at rest. (this is high school physics by the way, proposing that photons have mass at rest is highly theoretical and totally unproven) :

Thought you might have no idea.....

[BadMac]

Originally Posted by J.O

Light travels at 3x10^8 m/s. The closest star to earth (after the sun) is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away. There are 31,449,600 seconds in a year, therefore it takes
9,434,880,000,000,000 seconds or 299,178 years for the light to reach earth... I think. but i guess it gives you a rough idea... Bring on the wormholes!!!

If its 4.2 light years away and the light is travelling at the speed of light, it takes 4.2 years to get here and if you wanted to visit and could travel at the speed of light, you would take 4.2 years to get there. I think you confused yourself somewhere in the seconds to planets root mean squared constant.

Interesting thread, I have read of this before and theres plenty of contoversy.

Latest "faster than the speed of light" claims wrong (again)
By Chris Lee | Published: August 16, 2007 - 07:38PM CT

A paper submitted to the physics arXiv has been picked up by a number of major news outlets (e.g., the Daily Mail) because the paper suggests that its authors have measured something traveling faster than the speed of light. Unfortunately, the claim is worse than weak; it is silly. I'll talk about why that is after briefly discussing their research.

The paper in question has no data at all so; although it asserts that it has measured superluminal velocities, it offers nothing to back that up. It also has very little in the way of experimental detail, so we can't determine with certainty what they are measuring, making it very difficult to evaluate their claims. We'll take as close a look as we can, given these limitations.

The researchers make use of the property called total internal reflection (brief discussion). When light is above a certain angle of incidence on an interface between two materials—say, at the face of a prism—it can be totally reflected, provided it is arriving at this interface from the higher refractive index material. However, near the boundary, something called an evanescent wave forms that does not propagate like normal light (technically it does not propagate at all) and quickly decays away to nothing. If you take a second prism and place it very close to the interface where total internal reflection occurred, then some light from this evanescent wave will leak across the interface and exit the second prism. The prisms have to be no further than the wavelength of light involved for this to work.

Now the interesting questions are: where did the energy in this light come from? How fast did it travel across the boundary? The first question is interesting because the evanescent field has no energy in it. This is because the electric and magnetic fields that make up the field are phased in such a way that the product is always zero. The second question is interesting because the speed of light is not defined in a way that is intuitive to non-physicists. Suffice it to say that, for the evanescent wave, the speed of light is zero, and therefore any measurable speed is faster than the speed of light.

So, how are these authors measuring an excessive speed of light? In practical terms, most experiments measure light in terms of what is called the group velocity, which is how fast a pulse propagates along an underlying carrier frequency. This can, in some circumstances, lead to the pulses traveling faster than the speed of light in the medium they're in, but not faster than light in vacuum. Although the setup in the new paper is not entirely clear, they were measuring the arrival time of pulses, which means we're talking about group velocity rather than the actual speed of light.

Another problem that occurs in these experiments comes from determining when the pulse actually arrived. If you analyze a pulse of light, you find that it is made up of a huge number of frequencies that, as you move away from the fundamental frequency, get lower and lower in amplitude. Once you look at the experimental set up in detail, you find that it is triggering on the pre-pulse noise generated by these high frequency components.

Separate from the whole speed of light issue, the answer to the energy question in this experimental setup is interesting. Once the two prisms are close to each other, the evanescent wave is partially reflected from the second prism back to the first prism. When this happens, the total electric field and total magnetic field are no longer such that their product is always zero—there is energy in the field. Furthermore, if you analyze the components of the fields that contain the energy, you find that they do have a non-zero speed of light and it is—you guessed it—the same c that applies everywhere else in the universe.

So although this makes for an interesting physics lecture—or at least I thought it was interesting—it is not new physics and not a breakdown of special relativity.

If you fully understood that, you are wasting your life on this forum.

[asusdragon]

that a pretty easy to understand, i didnt have a problem with it. learnt all bout this in year 8 physics
lol im joking too, only read about 1 paragraph and i was lost

[thefargo]

when you look in the mirror you do not see the real image of yourself at that time, but rather a younger you. so, why bother?

[BadMac]

Originally Posted by thefargo

when you look in the mirror you do not see the real image of yourself at that time, but rather a younger you. so, why bother?

Anyway you can slow that reflection down by about 10 years, my wife will pay plenty for that still be cheaper than all those age defying products.

[AUIIForte]

Originally Posted by Mental

If you had the ability to measure time in nano seconds, yes you would see a delay in your reflection. And just so were not confused here, that is a FACT not Theory.

Would you like to prove that to me?

Wouldn't that be all over media and such? It hasn't. Which means its only in the minds of those who STILL believe in Albert Einsteins "SPECIAL" theory of relativity, which is not so much special anymore, for the fact that more smarter people (not him from 1905 but from now 2007) have PROVEN his theories wrong.

[MeestaNob!]

Originally Posted by thefargo

when you look in the mirror you do not see the real image of yourself at that time, but rather a younger you. so, why bother?

Because even if you use the mirror to shave and have infact already developed re-growth it doesnt matter, cause everyone who sees you at work in the morning will also be seeing a slightly older image of you where you havent got stubble yet.

I think my brain just *popped*.

[saber]

Originally Posted by flappist

Well is a photon energy or a particle? If it is energy why does it have a finite unit and if it is a particle then it must have mass........

Light cannot escape a black hole because of its gravity. Gravity acts on mass.

Try again......

Have a read of this:

Newton thought that only objects with mass could produce a gravitational force on each other. Applying Newton's theory of gravity, one would conclude that since light has no mass, the force of gravity couldn't affect it. Einstein discovered that the situation is a bit more complicated than that. First he discovered that gravity is produced by a curved space-time. Then Einstein theorized that the mass and radius of an object (its compactness) actually curves space-time. Mass is linked to space in a way that physicists today still do not completely understand. However, we know that the stronger the gravitational field of an object, the more the space around the object is curved. In other words, straight lines are no longer straight if exposed to a strong gravitational field; instead, they are curved. Since light ordinarily travels on a straight-line path, light follows a curved path if it passes through a strong gravitational field. This is what is meant by "curved space," and this is why light becomes trapped in a black hole. In the 1920's Sir Arthur Eddington proved Einstein's theory when he observed starlight curve when it traveled close to the Sun. This was the first successful prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

One way to picture this effect of gravity is to imagine a piece of rubber sheeting stretched out. Imagine that you put a heavy ball in the center of the sheet. The weight of the ball will bend the surface of the sheet close to it. This is a two-dimensional picture of what gravity does to space in three dimensions. Now take a little marble and send it rolling from one side of the rubber sheet to the other. Instead of the marble taking a straight path to the other side of the sheet, it will follow the contour of the sheet that is curved by the weight of the ball in the center. This is similar to how the gravitation field created by an object (the ball) affects light (the marble).

Got this off: http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resou...kground.html#3

Basically, the reason why light cannot escape a black hole is due to the gravity waves created by the black hole. Light travels in a straight line, and can be bent due to the presence of a gravitational field (like gravity we experience on earth). The point is, the gravitational field on a black hole is massive, hence photons(light) are pulled into the center of the black hole, and due to the strong gravitational field, cannot escape.