breaking the speed of light article on howstuffworks.com

At some point you should receive the lecture about how, in beginning classes, there are plenty of simplifications and outright mis-truths told in order to make understanding easier. The supposed "law" of conversatoin of energy only applies under certain specific scenarios and -- while those scenarios are quite common in everyday life -- once you start playing with quantum mechanics you've violated the assumptions upon which the "laws" were founded.

Quantum physics is full of many non-intuitive and seemingly contradictory results. :-)

Only if you're a photon. :-)

"At some point you should receive the lecture about how, in beginning classes, there are plenty of simplifications and outright mis-truths told in order to make understanding easier. The supposed "law" of conversatoin of energy only applies under certain specific scenarios and -- while those

scenarios are quite common in everyday life -- once you start playing with quantum mechanics you've violated the assumptions upon which the "laws" were founded."

"the ideal gas" comes to mind.

a photon is defined as massless, but can you say it has volume?

i suppose it doesn't literally take up space, but it has a size right?

....or was that a stupid question?

Add this to your thinking....

Light shows particulate characteristecs, this shows they MUST have a maximum speed.

Light being pure energy "w/o" mass, it has to be the fastest.

Conclusion: to travel beyond the speed of light, one must be able to either: a) warp space b) stop time

Now measure the falling delay.

Was the other signal called the "latch", by chance?

Fourteen and already bitchin' about her age. ;-)

At UIUC too. It was the *only* way to pass Chemistry.

Sure, how else could we enjoy being OT?

Right. Give us a better screwdriver and we'll use that too.

It ("everything we know may be wrong") makes life easy, since if you don't believe in what we (think we) know there's no reason to do any work.

In article , keith wrote: [...]

I actually got a spec from some fairly smart people that said that one pulse had to be produced before the other. The later pulse was called the "trigger" and was supposed to be the external input to the circuit.

What they really wanted was a circuit that made two pulses that partly overlapped. They didn't really want to have to provide the "trigger" input.

In article , John Larkin wrote: [...]

I don't think this version of the experiment can be actually done. The "measure the arrival times" part is not easy unless the shutter and the detector are closer together than the length of the trip. If they aren't there will be trouble making the shutter and the timer be in sync.

This is also likely to be the easier way to do it. You need a tunable laser so you can measure the change in interferance with wave length. If not you will have trouble proving you are not just off by N cycles.

In article , Gareth wrote: [...]

Actually it prevents anything that is not already FTL from getting there. If something is FTL it can't slow down and has weird backwards physics.

You can get what appears to be FTL motion by projecting a image onto a far away screen and rotating the projector. Since photon etc don't wear dog tags, you can get some funny measurements if you aren't careful.

"I think you're really 41"

If I was 41, I'd understand calculus, wouldn't I?

Well, if matter had to have mass to have energy, then what would energy really be? A photon is not matter, it's pure energy.

I have always wondered, though, what the link is between light as a particle and light as a wave.

For that matter, all waves can be described as particles