FTL (Faster Than Light) communications?

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Ray L. Volts 21 years ago

I remember seeing a spot on tv news several years ago about a small group of researchers who claimed they had sent an audio signal (human voice from a recording I believe) through a transmitter device which emitted the signal several microseconds BEFORE they had sent it!

As I recall, they said microwaves were somehow employed to allegedly accomplish this feat.

Even if FTL is possible, would not the fact that humans perceive time as linear preclude their being able to notice this effect -- since they themselves were not sent through the device along with the signal?

I think either their equipment was out of calibration, in which case the joke's on them, poor bastards, or they flat out fudged the numbers. If this were real and recreatable in the lab, one would think we'd be hearing about its progress virtually every week. It seems to me, therefore, that this has gone the way of the infamous cold fusion experiments which initially generated such furor.

Anyone care to take a stab at how a communications phenomenon like this could be measured??

-Ray

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Walter Harley 21 years ago

Yes, and plenty on these and other newsgroups already have.

Care to do a bit of research, rather than just trolling? You might start by searching sci.electronics.design for the term "FTL". Or the term "group delay".

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Paul Burridge 21 years ago

I'm sure Jim Thompson has a chip to handle it somewhere in his extensive, home-designed inventory.

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

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Dbowey 21 years ago

Absolutely! It is done by very careful application of a KS144689 List 3 Legpuller.

Don

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John Fields 21 years ago

I'm sure that Jim has, in his library, things which you wouldn't even dare to dream about, and I'm also sure that the only thing you can be sure of of is that you're a know-nothing poser with delusions of grandeur. Grandeur, in your case, thinking that you know how to clean toilets without chipping the bowl.

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Jim Thompson 21 years ago

Or chipping his teeth. ROTFLMAO!

...Jim Thompson

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Active8 21 years ago

Good call!

Best Regards, Mike

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Paul Burridge 21 years ago

That's a matter for the Feds. His private life is no concern of mine.

Hehe! Yeah, whatever.

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

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Fred Bloggs 21 years ago

Right0- Burridge typifies the riffraff who come on USENET to shoot their f--g mouth off with a bunch of specious verbiage in some puerile attempt at appearing clever. You never see this crowd do anything productive- the same vermin also whine about un-professional posting. These people are sleazy unemployable rejects- the UK appears to be full of scum like this- a consequence of the end of the colonial era where there is no place left to eject the things- Australia is filled up.

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Paul Burridge 21 years ago

Outrageous! I haven't been so insulted since Monday.

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

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John Fields 21 years ago

Putting the "received before it was transmitted' hokum aside, determining whether superluminal communications exists is dead easy. What you do is set up two identical communications channels and feed their inputs with a single pulse, then measure the difference in arrival times of the output pulses. The difference which exists will be due to the fact that both channels aren't exactly identical, and once that systematic delay difference is noted, the superluminal signalling device (SSD) is introduced into one of the channels and the measurement made again. Now, once the result of the measurement is normalized by subtracting out the systematic delay, the delay exhibited by the superluminal channel should be less than that exhibited by the control channel. The measurement should be made many times, of course, with the SSD moved back and forth between channels to make sure whether or not the short delay follows the SSD.

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Ken Smith 21 years ago

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

I disagree. The experiment needs to have 2 way communications at a speed faster than light. You have to send the signal from on location, have it cause something at another and return a signal to the first. Without the return trip the FLT could be an illusion.

-- kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

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Mjolinor 21 years ago

I like that but hey we are not as bad as we would have been if we hadn't diluted the seed over the last couple of hundred years with our exports. :)

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John Larkin 21 years ago

Am I missing something here? Why not set up a measurement station somewhere, and send (by conventional means... microwave, light, fiber optics, coax) a sample of the transmitted signal (from the transmit site) and the received signal (from receive site) to the common observer? It's trivial to subtract out the prop delays. The measurement site could obviously be at the transmitter, eliminating one of the comm links.

John

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John Miller 21 years ago

I have just found this scribbled in one of the notebooks of my departed friend, Noah: "I have a truly marvellous demonstration (based on causality) of the impossibility of faster-than-light communication, which this margin is too narrow to contain..."

John Miller Email address: domain, n4vu.com; username, jsm First law of debate: Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.

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John Fields 21 years ago

Dunno...

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John Larkin 21 years ago

Is there in fact a causality violation which precludes FTL communications?

John

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John Miller 21 years ago

You'd have to ask Noah, but I suspect that what would violate causality is actually any scenario in which the signal arrives before it was sent.

John Miller Email address: domain, n4vu.com; username, jsm "All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." -Fran Lebowitz

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Ken Smith 21 years ago

[...]

Who/what is this "common observer" and how do you they/it didn't decide what to tell you some time after the experiment is all over. If you can't prove they/it didn't, you haven't really proven FTL.

If you form the path into a simple loop, so you can see both ends, you can't rule out crosstalk.

This is why I say you need to send the signal to some device and return an answer back. If you do that you can rule out the delayed decide and the crosstalk.

-- kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

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Rich Grise 21 years ago

Because the only way to find out if your transmission got received is to compare something.

The only way is to have a transponder, say, on the moon, with your transmitter and receiver in a lab or whatever. When you receive the signal, you damn well better send the right signal "on time", or all Hell will break loose.

Remember thiotimoline?

Cheers! Rich

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FTL (Faster Than Light) communications?

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