Weird electron behavior

Yes. Education is the process of inserting abstract thoughts into concrete heads.

Cheers! Rich

Have you ever heard of the time they put an engineer and a mathematician on one side of a room, and a hot babe on the other, and said, "Here are the rules. You can take as many steps as you wish to get across the room, as quickly as you wish, but each step must be exactly half the length of the previous step. Your first step is allowed to extend exactly half- way across the room, and from there, take as many steps as you wish, each being half as long as its predecessor."

The engineer is satisfied with this specification, strides across the room, and scoops up the babe, while the mathematician is still doing the series in his head. ;-)

Hint: "as many steps as you wish" includes infinity, if you wish. ;-P

It certainly approaches it as a limit, and we bump up against limits annoyingly often, out here in real life. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Right, but this only happens inside dielectrics. It's the speed of light *in vacuo* that's the relativistic limit. Optical propagation in dielectrics is calculated using mean-field theory, which allows us to smear out the individual effects of 10^22 molecules per cm^^3. Its main effect in dielectrics is to change the effective speed of light in the material. No relativistic funny stuff is involved.

Cheers,

Phil

The "intelligent design" approach to explanation - full marks for compelteness, but zero for predictive power.

Try reading more of the thread before you post a response - this was the gist of my first contribution to the thread, though I did manage to work in a reference to a "two-dimensional electron gas" which s a phrase that generates 161,000 google hits. Adding in "single-layer" and "graphite" still leaves 1220. Your formulation is less helpful.

IThis is cute, but scarcely original - science fiction has been using the idea for some thirty years now. In Ian M. Banks' latest book - "The Algebraist" - the idea is the basis of the sole remainng established religion.

----------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Actually, there are situation when regular particles, such as electrons, can move faster than local speed of light. I am not kidding. It is called "cherenkov effect".

correct.

Sure it does. You just say "they're weird" and it explains it all. :)

More to the point. Electrons are not required to behave in ways that we call common sense. When things are on that scale, common sense isn't very trustworthy. Common sense is what we expect from seeing things in the macro scale.

I know you'll like this: God is really a 13 year old boy playing SimUniverse in some vast computer. When you have a large number of particles in consideration, the limited resolution of the numbers is washed out. In the very small case, the effects of the limited number of bits becomes obvious.

This computer may be vast, but I think the theory is only half vast.