O.K. I think I understand what Chronos said and how it relates to the OP. However, the lead in, Particles faster than light, for real seems to be saying “Is it possible for anything to go faster than light?” Then Imaginary comes up with his postulation about light slowing down and being passed up by some particle.
In regard to something going faster than light, I’m of the understanding that there is no reason to think there aren’t particles going faster than light, just that they can’t go the speed of light. Also that no information can be passed from one side to the other. I’ll even throw out the idea I heard that if I was on the other side I would think that y’all were going faster than the speed of light.
So with the notion of cerenkov radiation and the sonic boom analogy with particles travelling faster than the local speed of photons… What sort of consequences would this have for particles travelling through light that slowed way down? Like those guys at harvard who slowed it down to 38 mph and eventually (I remember reading it in nature) brought it to a complete halt. Does the vast difference in speeds make the effect of the passing particle any more profound? or less so? Obviously it didn’t blow up the physics lab or permanently blind the researchers… Anything interesting?
When I started reading this thread I thought it was one of those “star wars fan debating star trek fan on invented astrophysics” things… then got a little embarassed when there seemed to be actual science behind the bizarre stuff.
Well, no things get tricky if you plug in a value larger than c into the equation for finding gamma, which governs apparent length and clock speed, as well as mass. At c, the equation forces you to divide by 0. Above c, you’re forced to take the square root of a negative number.
For sci-fi, that’s fine - fiction is full of imaginary numbers, anyway. (Bwahahaha! I kill me.)
Kaje wrote:
I didn’t see the Nature article, but did read Hau’s article in Scientific American. The resulting letters are informative, too, Hau’s response stating that all the individual photons in the experiments are actually moving at close to the speed of light in a vacuum, anyway. So, in that regard, no nothing interesting.
If no information can be passed to or from tachyons, then in what sense do they exist? Postulating unovservable is an unnecessary complication. If you were going faster than light and could receive no information from me, why would you assume that I even exist?