Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 23:00:44 06/06/00
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> Now I hear that Dr. Wang of NEC at Princeton has accelerated light to 300X the > speed of light. If you read carefully these types of 'faster than light' claims (which have been around for decades in various forms), nothing objective really moves that fast, no signal can be transmitted by such experimental setups. In all such experiments the illusion of some "velocity" exceeding light speed c is achieved in a steady state of periodic phenomena and clever filtering of suitably synchronized detection events. At the bottom, these "velocities" is not different than the "velocity" you could obtain by moving a flashlight beam across a distant wall -- the distant light spot moves faster than c in the sense that the light detectors at points A and B on the distant wall, separated by a distance D, will trigger with time time difference T, where v=D/T > c. With such "wishful" definition of v, you could obtain v infinite by splitting the light beam via half-silvered mirror in such way that detectors A and B trigger at the same time i.e. T=0, so that v=D/T=infinity. Nothing in reality is being sent from A to reach B with such "velocity" v. Like the related miraculous claims of the so-called "quantum computing" and "quantum cryptography" folks (priesthoods), this is a wishful semantics serving as a sales pitch to draw the research funding (at least for a while, until the guys paying demand to see some tangible application of these miracles). You can check the site http://www.keyinnov.demon.co.uk/antiqm.htm by a reputable British physicist, Trevor Marshall, for some down to earth debunking of various 'quantum magic' claims.
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