LANL scientist makes radio waves travel faster than light

Photo: This Los Alamos National Laboratory gadget, called a polarization synchrotron, combines radio waves and a rapidly spinning magnetic field, which forces radio waves to travel faster than the speed of light.

[Santos]

Radio waves, like light, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum and are thus essentially the same thing. Singleton appears not to understand this.

Whatever qualifications the guy has should be revoked on that basis alone.

[Cynic]

Santos wrote:

Radio waves, like light, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum and are thus essentially the same thing. Singleton appears not to understand this.
Whatever qualifications the guy has should be revoked on that basis alone.

Not to mention he seems to be taking credit for the work of many. Unfortunately, we live in a culture of celebrity, where most people don't even stop to think that there might be more than one person making everything work.

Self-aggrandizing fluff piece.

[George Pomonis]

I'm anxiously waiting to see that work published in a peer reviewed journal.

[Zorkon 756]

Faster than the speed of light? I thought light was the speed limit.

[Zorkon 756]

This is interesting, should had read it first.

It suggests a very interesting future for mankind if we don't destroy ourselves first.

Might make worm-holes obsolete, lol.

[ras]

A blog exchange

Very cool... made my brain hurt a little.

Getting use to that form of motion sickness is SICK!

So we can send messages back to the future!

Warning use with caution!.........

I was thinking the same thing.
Send a message to Hitler to be nice.

well I can't talk much about my Gismos(patent pend.and all...) but I can tell you.You can tell anything you want to anyone you want at anytime you want as long as you can get the receiver to them..........



Aw Jeez

Talking about your Dawn of a new Age!

[ras]

LMAO
I would send a message to myself.
"DO NOT MARRY THAT STUPID B@#CH YOU F#@KING DUMB ASS!"
well here's what I can do for you,If you get the service plan with the receiver we'll let you call yourself if the next one also goes south on you..........
PS
Our client list is privet so Do not ask if your future X is a client :)
THAT is mind blowing.

[Doom]

And yet there's no explanation of how it works. Radio waves and magnetic fields, very descriptive indeed. I'm waiting for it to actually be published, let alone in a peer-reviewed journal.

So if I aim my Wi-Fi antenna at a magnet that I'm spinning in my hand, that'll make Doc Brown in his DeLorean show up to chew me out for disrupting the time stream, right?

[Danukeru]

Just because the radio wave itself seemingly travels faster than the speed of light relative to us, doesn't mean we can use it for communications.

We have the basic problem of causality: the message being received before it is even sent.

Many have already found similar findings, notably American and Italian teams noted similar effects using mirror arrays in one setup, and an intermingling of waves I believe such as here.
However if this is the case, they were cautious to remind us that the transfer of "information" would still be subject to the laws of relativity, thus actual superluminal communication would be unreliable, if not definitely impossible.

[Zorkon 756]

Well, lots of people talk on phones right now without the slightest movement of the "light".

[Ceno]

Sensationalist article of no interest for the educated.I'm expecting to see this in a scientific journal where they don't distinguish "radio" waves from "light" and theydon't condense modern physics in the "einstein" caricature.

[Jim-Bo]

Typical stupid liberal journalist.

Einstein NEVER said that nothing can go faster than light.
(I have a degree in physics from UT)
He said that nothing can accelerate to that of the speed of light.
Look up the Lorentz transformation and plot that equation.

[guerom00]

George Pomonis wrote:

I'm anxiously waiting to see that work published in a peer reviewed journal.

J. OPt. Soc. Am. A, vol. 25, pp. 780 (2008)
:)

[George Pomonis]

guerom00 wrote:

<quoted text>
J. OPt. Soc. Am. A, vol. 25, pp. 780 (2008)
:)

My library doesn't carry that journal.{;-))

[Jim-Bo]

Read this.

http://images.google.com/imgres...

[James]

The ansible is real.

[guerom00]

George Pomonis wrote:

<quoted text>
My library doesn't carry that journal.{;-))

What can I do…
Read the abstract at least : http://www.opticsinfobase.org.pass.cisti-icis...

[Forrest]

This article has some problems with it. For example, it quotes Singleton as saying "Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light – but phenomenon [sic] like radio waves? That's a different story..."

Radio waves ARE light, just at wavelengths that are far too long to be seen by humans. But the physical laws that govern radio propagation are EXACTLY the same as those that govern all other forms of light.

Then there's this humdinger:

"If you take a laser and shine it on the moon and swing it rather gently, for example, the spot on the moon travels faster than the speed of light..."

No, it does not. The rate at which the spot "learns" that the laser angle has changed occurs at the speed of light, and this prevents the spot from moving any faster than the speed of light. This is easy to prove using Special Relativity.

[Jim-Bo]

Yeah, that article is a just junk science. Right, Radio waves ARE light.

[Jacob Fugal]

Jim-Bo and guerom00 (and anyone else interested):

The paper is available through arxiv.org here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0399