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

[MiM]

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.

Not that I can really add anything that would give that any credence, but I actually like the argument.

[mistermack]

When people talk about time travel, I think that they are getting the wrong picture.
If a particle WERE able to go back in time, it would only be time as regards that particle. Say it was possible for a particle to go back 24 hrs. The rest of the Universe would NOT. It would continue ageing as normal. So you would just get a particle 24 hrs younger, in a Universe that was as normal.
So TIME would not ACTUALLY run backwards, unless you could get the entire universe inside your time machine.

If you put ME in a time machine, and turned the clock back a year, I would be a year younger, and would have no memory of the last year. So the world would be a year older than me when I stepped out.
I would think that I'd travelled a year into the future. In fact, it would just be that I had gone into reverse by one year.

It might be possible for a single particle that didn't encounter any other matter. But for particles that have interacted with other particles, it would be impossible to run back time, unless you found all of those particles, and got them into the time machine in exactly the same positions at the right time, so that every single interaction could be run in reverse.

[JimC]

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.

Fair point, I forgot about the exotic stuff like that; but diamond is the solid that slows light down the most...

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.

Not that I can really add anything that would give that any credence, but I actually like the argument.

Me too! But only if neutrinos are truly massless...

[Rum]

Coxy's been commenting on this. One hypothesis he says is the introduction of a dimensional element (i.e. one of any number of other dimensions) so that the little bugger has to traverse that 'space' as well which delays it.

I should get a job on reader's digest...

[mistermack]

I know nothing of why light is slowed in various materials.
I always ASSUMED that it was because it was getting internally deflected and reflected, so that it's path was effectively lengthened.
Like light hitting a pair of mirrors and bouncing between them for a while before continuing onwards.
I've got no recollection of where I got that from, but it seemed logical enough.

[charlou]

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.

We've been watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos (the series, on DVD) ... he talked about people who try to shut down the expression of alternative ideas and how that suppressive behavior goes against what science is really about. I agree.

[mistermack]

We've been watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos (the series, on DVD) ... he talked about people who try to shut down the expression of alternative ideas and how that suppressive behavior goes against what science is really about. I agree.

Humans are very much tribal animals. It's only in the last few thousand years that we have developed the ability to live alone, independently. Before that, it was live in a group, or very quickly get killed off.

So we have all of the instincts of apes and monkeys, of tightly knit group living. That involves fighting for status in the pecking order. So we have an instinct to put others down, in order to raise our own standing.

That's why some people jump so obsessively onto theories and ideas. It goes way beyond debating facts.

I used to be on Dawkins, and there was a hot topic about the aquatic ape hypothesis. It got really vitriolic, and continued on for ages.
I just recently looked on Talk Rational, and there were the SAME PEOPLE, debating the same subject, in the same vitriolic way. It was like time has stood still.
I disagree with the aquatic ape idea, but it's a sterile argument because there's no way to disprove it, or prove it.
How the same people can be still slanging each other off after all this time I just don't know.
I can understand someone getting a bit obsessive about his favourite theory. But how do you get so obsessive about REFUTING someone else's? To still be at it after all this time.
How long is it since Dawkins went pop?

[Animavore]

Brian Cox talks about it here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014vy08

[Hermit]

Brian Cox talks about it here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014vy08

Thanks for the link, but I will not trawl through a three hour program to find the ten minutes, or whatever, talk with Brian Cox.

[Animavore]

Go to 2:17:00

[Animavore]

Oh joy! He's making a new series for the BBC called The Wonders of Life about abiogenesis, evolution... etc.

[Hermit]

Go to 2:17:00

Thank you.

[mistermack]

The Brian Cox interview is good stuff.
I've linked to just the Cox bit on mp3 below.

Brian Cox Interview Here

[Tero]

[pcCoder]

I know nothing of why light is slowed in various materials.
I always ASSUMED that it was because it was getting internally deflected and reflected, so that it's path was effectively lengthened.
Like light hitting a pair of mirrors and bouncing between them for a while before continuing onwards.
I've got no recollection of where I got that from, but it seemed logical enough.

I used to think that it was because it was absorbed and re-emitted by the atoms in the material and that the thing that 'slowed' the photons down was the delays in absorption and emission, not the actual photon getting slower? I don't have the slightest clue what is really happening.