breaking the speed of light article on howstuffworks.com

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'breaking the speed of light article on howstuffworks.com', on Sat, 5 Feb 2005:

It's also excellent science. We still use Newtonian mechanics to design cars, planes and ships, even though we know it's not quite right. But it doesn't work for TV cathode-ray tubes.

I read in sci.electronics.design that ~~SciGirl~~ wrote (in ) about 'breaking the speed of light article on howstuffworks.com', on Sat, 5 Feb 2005:

It's 'tachyon' - 'fast particle'. 'Tracheyon' would be 'windpipe particle' (cough, cough!).

No, a photon has certain properties, including zero mass and travelling at C in a vacuum. Tachyons (if they exist) have different properties, apart from always travelling faster than C. For instance, they may have imaginary (in the mathematical sense) mass, not zero mass.

Because it makes life worse for everybody, especially themselves. And all the sneering causes wrinkles.

John

Depends where you come from.

Gareth.

Hmmmm, fresh meat =)

I was thinking and figured that the only thing

You aren't on the same track as I am. Light (photons) are a soliton-phenomena in a soliton-conducting quantum foam.

Then today I read about that

My understanding is,

1. You play a cheap trick regarding phase velocity (which is what I suspect is in your mind)

1. You modify the conducting (quantum foam, quantum-vacuum) medium. You must be God.

2. I don't understand Nature as it is, so something else is possible.

You are thinking of matter and energy "particles" in vacuum. My understanding is quite a bit different. The quantum vacuum is *every possibility* occurring (multiple-parallel universes, or Feynman's "Sum of all Paths" un-yet realized). BUT initial conditions at the big bang is progressively detecting (through time at light-speedm by scattering "observations") crystallizing definite realities out of infinite possibilities inherent in the quantum vacuum.

Actually no.

IIRC it was called gate.

"trigger" controlled the current in a coil and "gate" controled the sampling of the ADC circuits. Both were mis-named for what they really did.

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

You are trying to send really fast edges a fair distance. The VP of coax is not a constant. It varies by several precent from the start of the roll to the end. If the FLT is only 1% faster that C this could be a confounding factor.

You'd be better off with light beams as they go at the same speed. You would want to use one beam and a beam splitter to make the transmit timing exact. The optical receivers would have to be matched quite well too unless the distances are many feet.

I recall Tektronix illustrating that the a scope trace on one of their GHz scopes resulted in the display apparenly travelling faster than light.

Of course nothing *actually* had to travel faster than light to cause the effect.

Graham

Hmmmm... but photons have energy. How so if no mass ?

Isn't the wave / particle debate fun ?

Graham

Real meteorologists are a long way from any TV studio and they do all kinds of physics, fluid dynamics, math, whatnot.

- YD.

Calculus is easy. But first, you should measure the slope at various points on the curve Y = X squared or cubed. Once you have done this several times (and it is laborious) you will be able to appreciate the value of being able to calculate slopes (gradients) instead of measuring them. That is the Differential Calculus.

After that comes the Integral Calculus. That too is a doddle, it is about calculating the areas under curves by summing very small slivers. But as I said, to really appreciate its utility and beauty it helps to have done these things the hard way first.

I posted this before. You should watch the physics lectures - they are very good indeed - here's what I said:-

At the risk of swamping their website, for those who want to brush up their Electromagnetism, I think that the Video lectures at

Aside from these videoed lectures, I found just 3 others:-

From the same professor:-

and two mathematics lectures (Linear Algebra):-

Most of this is 1'st year university stuff.

You'll need RealPlayer to watch the lectures

Of course there is lots of other stuff - maybe something of interest in Aeronautics & Astronautics and some stuff in mpeg format.

Here is my best advice:-

Throw away your calculator.

Maybe it's a bit extreme - but unless you understand how the underlying mathematics works it won't help you to succeed - except in finishing worksheets.

Once you know what a Sine is, you will find the calculator useful to tell you what the Sine of a particular angle is.

In proper mathematics exams, you will not be allowed to use a fancy calculator that does graphing or, say, symbolic differentiation.

In article , keith wrote: [...]

LSSD???

You are obviouslt responding to something that came to only you on the google-groups. There is something very wring with the code google uses to do its posting. The rest of us often don't see your posts in the context you expected us to.

BTW: Claiming you are 14 instead of 41 can get your book or TV script published.

Try stopping 10, 41 year olds on a street corner and see if they do. I doubt more than half do.

IMNSHO, I would expect _maybe_ ONE to _understand_ Calculus, most of the others _may_ have _heard_ of Calculus.

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

I read in sci.electronics.design that ~~SciGirl~~ wrote (in ) about 'breaking the speed of light article on howstuffworks.com', on Sat, 5 Feb 2005:

One of the several differences between the spelling of US English and British English. These terms are not a joke; they are taken very seriously by professional translators, who have to translate, say, Russian into whichever sort of English the client wants.

A few days ago, someone here asked what a 'chook' was. It's Australian English for 'chicken'. There are a lot of special words like that in Australian English.

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'breaking the speed of light article on howstuffworks.com', on Sat, 5 Feb 2005:

For early colour tubes, the geometry of the deflection region was so critical that electron speeds around 10% of C required relativistic effects to be taken into account. IIRC, the EHT was around 25 kV.

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So lunch may not be free but there's sure a lot of software out there :-)

- YD.