![]() ![]() Under special relativity, if something travels faster than the speed of light, it goes backwards in time. If the finding of the OPERA experiment does pan out, the implications are much more mind-bending. That is why this result is so surprising and unexpected." "Special relativity has been passing tests with flying colors for over 100 years now. "Our understanding hasn't evolved at all, we've been doing extremely precise tests of special relativity since the very first days," said Ben Monreal, an assistant professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara. The finding appears to fly in the face of the last 106 years of physics. Shockingly, the neutrinos appeared to beat light speed by 60 billionths of a second. Scientists working on the OPERA experiment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland beamed neutrinos 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground to Italy, and calculated how fast they made the trip. Since Einstein introduced special relativity, the theory and the special status it gives to the speed of light have appeared iron-clad. This, however, does not increase the speed at which the actual electromagnetic information travels - this is conveyed by the overall shape of the wave's amplitude. In the lab, researchers can create the impression of sending light faster than the speed limit by tweaking the speed at which the wave crests of light propagate through space. ![]() "They usually turn out to involve accelerating motion, something that is not really an object" - like the bright spot of the laser pointer - "or infinite energy." In other words, cheats. "For 100 years, people have used these and more sophisticated paradoxes to try to say, 'Well isn't there this way to exceed the speed of light?'" Galison said. If you shine a laser pointer on the surface of the moon and flick your wrist to sweep across the surface, wouldn't that mean that the bright dot is crossing the surface of the moon faster than the speed of light? No, because nothing is actually crossing the surface of the moon - the dot isn't an actual object, it is just a series of photons in the laser beam hitting the surface. Galison uses a hypothetical to explain why. But between interactions with atoms, it is still traveling at 186,000 miles per second (300 million meters per second), he said.Ĭlaims that it's possible to push light beyond 186,000 miles per second (300 million meters per second), are equally illusory, Galison said. Light traveling through different mediums, such as chilled sodium gas, does slow substantially, but this is because the light is being bounced between the atoms within the medium. Some experiments have appeared to play with the speed of light, but these effects are illusory, according to Galison. In fact, objects with mass, be they cars or neutrinos, can't reach the speed of light because they would need infinite energy to do so, according to the theory. Under Einstein's theory, the speed of light becomes a sort of ultimate speed limit. But you could never catch up to, or even reduce the apparent speed of a pulse of light, regardless of whether you were driving toward it or away from it. So, if you have a fast enough car, in theory, you could catch up to a bullet. Einstein postulated that light always travels at the same speed for every observer, regardless of that observer's speed, Galison explained. Special relativity is also based on a second assumption that gives the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second (300 million meters per second) - in a vacuum a special status. ![]()
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