THE SPEED OF LIGHT CAN BE EXCEEDED! Fuckn' hell!

[JimC]

Okay, so this conflicts with what MiM wrote, that photons do not "slow down" at all, they still travel at C between atoms in the glass, and are absorbed and reemitted at each atom.

I think it was XC who wrote that. I believe that there is quite a lot of inexactness in what XC has written here about why the speed of light in a medium is slower than c.

The constant c refers to the speed of light in a vacuum. That's all there is to it. The speed light travels at in other materials is not c.

And furthermore particles can move faster in a medium than light moves in the same medium. This is actually quite common, and lies behind phenomena like the Cherenkov radiation, the blue light that can be seen around nuclear fuel in water.

I was about to mention that...

Beta particles are emitted from many unstable nuclei at speeds of up to 99% of c (300,000,000 m/s). If the radioactive decay occurs from a sample immersed in water, the particle may end up being at a speed which is considerably greater than the "local" speed limit for light in water (approxinmately 225,000,000 m/s) The relativistic cops step in (jk), and "force" the Beta particle to slow down by emitting an photon of light energy with a characteristic frequency. Hence, the erie blue glow of intensely radioactive materials in a cooling pond...

[Geoff]

2. The material which slows down light the most (to about 40% c) is diamond. As far as I'm aware this is as slow as it gets.

Way out, I'm afraid, Jim! Can't remember the exact figure, but using a Bose-Einstein condensate (of sodium, I think..or was it silicon?) it's been slowed to something like 40mph in the lab.

[Pappa]

[devogue]

So the CERN scientists hoped to find the Higgs Bosun and create a unified Theory of Everything, but now they've found fucking asshole neutrinos giving the middle finger to light as it whizzes by.

Physics was an annoying cunt of a science at school, and it's even worse now. At least I gave it up when I was 16 to save myself any of this grief.

[mistermack]

Ahem,

My very first thread on this site was entitled, "is relativity reality?" and I posed the question 'what would happen if a "new" form of light was discovered that could travel faster than light.
My attempted proof I eventually found fault with myself, but the QUESTION wasn't invalidated.

I actually suspect that this isn't it, and it will turn out to have a reasonable explanation. But the possibility won't have gone away.
No material or energy OF THE TYPE THAT WE KNOW OF can move faster than light. I suspect that that's not what's happening here. But that doesn't exclude other forms of energy, matter and information having a different ultimate speed, much faster than the speed of light.

That's why I posed the question, because if you look at what happens if you have information that travels faster than the SOL, special relativity becomes something that works for us and produces correct results, but isn't ACTUALLY what's happening.

When I posed the question, I was derided, and the general opinion what that it wasn't something you could even question. What that proved to me was that nobody on this site actually understands SR, they just have large chunks of it memorised.

[Clinton Huxley]

The paper, from Arxiv:-

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

[Atheist-Lite]

Causality is hardly conserved on the scale of the very small I've come to understand. A neutrino travels faster than light backwards in time? Well, when you pick up a old newspaper and read from it is the information, in the past, being brought to your present attention by photons? Interesting question...how fast are they travelling? Things don't make much sense on the scale of the very small. Experiments remove all kinds of 'noise' to reveal how the scale of the very small is not like what happens here. The double slit experiment and time travel and so on. It isn't the end of the world. Might be interesting for lottery numbers? The universe is determinstic afterall?

[drl2]

Forgive my ignorance...and I'm pretty goddamn ignorant...but why is the speed of light the fastest speed again? Why shouldn't anything exceed this speed?

Because Einstein said so, and nature doesn't fuck with Einstein.

[MiM]

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I think it was XC who wrote that. I believe that there is quite a lot of inexactness in what XC has written here about why the speed of light in a medium is slower than c.

It is an explanation I read in a book. A quantum particle-model explanation as opposed to the more usual wave-model explanation of EM interference that is given for the reduction in light velocity and refractive index. I found it easier to understand so it kind of stuck.

I expect that the ACTUAL truth of what goes on in there is far weirder than both explanations! Probably something to do with brainz tied up with silly string?

[Atheist-Lite]

It isn't that the speed of light can't be exceeded but the 'quations go a bit dotty and causality starts to run backwards once you go past the limit. t1=t2(sqr(1-(v^2/c^2)) or some such, graph them ou' and you'll see what happens once v>c. Also length and mass are inverted but that's maybe them curling up small inside neutrinos?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

OK, here's a weird suggestion...

What if light doesn't ever actually travel at lightspeed?

Photons can spontaneously transform into paired particles which (almost) instantly annihilate each other, returning a photon. They do it all the time - even in a vacuum. There is a seething, churning soup of particles being created and destroyed in every tiny corner of "empty" space. And there are other, more complex creations and destructions happening as well.

And all of this popping in and out of existence takes TIME. The net result being that light is not travelling as fast as it could conceivably travel, even in a vacuum. It takes slightly longer for light to get anywhere because of all of the quantum buggering about!

So, what about neutrinos? They have zero (or extremely low) mass. They hardly ever interact with most other particles. They can spontaneously transform into other kinds of neutrinos (the effect which the experiment in the OP was set up to measure) but these could well be massless as well.

Could it be that neutrinos actually travel closer to the maximum allowable speed in the universe than light does? Could it be that all previous calculations of c have failed to allow for quantum fluctuations slowing down electromagnetic particles and that c is actually bigger than we thought - the speed of neutrinos?

Just rambling. Feel free to shoot it down in flames.

[Atheist-Lite]

We need a 'xpert in here quick....before this all gets out of hand?

[Seth]

Forgive my ignorance...and I'm pretty goddamn ignorant...but why is the speed of light the fastest speed again? Why shouldn't anything exceed this speed?

Because Einstein said so, and nature doesn't fuck with Einstein.

Didn't Einstein temporize in saying that general relativity may only be a localized phenomenon?

[Azathoth]

OK, here's a weird suggestion...

What if light doesn't ever actually travel at lightspeed?

Photons can spontaneously transform into paired particles which (almost) instantly annihilate each other, returning a photon. They do it all the time - even in a vacuum. There is a seething, churning soup of particles being created and destroyed in every tiny corner of "empty" space. And there are other, more complex creations and destructions happening as well.

And all of this popping in and out of existence takes TIME. The net result being that light is not travelling as fast as it could conceivably travel, even in a vacuum. It takes slightly longer for light to get anywhere because of all of the quantum buggering about!

So, what about neutrinos? They have zero (or extremely low) mass. They hardly ever interact with most other particles. They can spontaneously transform into other kinds of neutrinos (the effect which the experiment in the OP was set up to measure) but these could well be massless as well.

Could it be that neutrinos actually travel closer to the maximum allowable speed in the universe than light does? Could it be that all previous calculations of c have failed to allow for quantum fluctuations slowing down electromagnetic particles and that c is actually bigger than we thought - the speed of neutrinos?

Just rambling. Feel free to shoot it down in flames.

Plausible hypothesis. Now do the maths to prove it