Almost reads like something out of a Douglas Adams book.
There’s a bit more info in the link, but it only confused me more.
Actually, it’s old news - I remember an article last year on the same phenomenon. But still cool!
Actually, it sounds kind of like the tunneling phenomenon found in solid state electronics, where an electron hits the P-N barrier and appears on the other side without ever going through it.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Imagine a water pipe full of water but no pressure. Add pressure on one end and you’ll get an instant result on the other with measurable resistance pressure at the input end as well.
Seems to me this is simply a flaw in the experiment. They should have shaken out all the light from the fiber optic cable before they started.
:smack:
Doesn’t this sort of “IT’S FTL!!” stuff crop up once or twice a year, and usually end up being an observational parlor trick with all FTL notions back in the wastebasket?
Yeah. It normally turns out that it’s the group velocity in a non-vacuum.
Isn’t this the thing about materials with negative refraction indices or something like that (my physics is far behind me)? I thought they were making it very clear that this does not go faster than light.
No, this is different, I do believe. A bit on what you’re talking about can be found here.
And technically, no matter what speed light is travelling at, it’s not going faster than the speed of light (the only way it could do that would be if it became something other than light,.)
No, it’s from this year. But since the light was travelling backwards you read it before it happened.
They better watch out - they’d feel pretty stupid if they crashed the universe and made it reboot.
Actually that’s happened a few times already. Nobody noticed.