[ExI] Nimtz >lux redux?
Damien Broderick
thespike at satx.rr.com
Thu Aug 16 23:22:24 UTC 2007
I wonder if this is new, or a rehash of very old Nimtz stuff (it's
cropping up today in quite a few papers, but I can't find it on the NS site):
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml>
'We have broken speed of light'
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/08/2007
A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light -
an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.
According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would
require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than
186,000 miles per second.
However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University
of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.
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The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave
photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously"
between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.
Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a
wide variety of bizarre consequences.
For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically
arrive at a destination before leaving.
The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum
tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently
unbreakable laws.
Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is
the only violation of special relativity that I know of."
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