Light going faster than light?

Comments

• Vorlons in my Head The Vorlons told me to.

  August 2005

  Is this supposed to answer the age old question that if I'm driving my car at 55mph with my headlights on is the light going 55mph faster than the speed of light? :D
  
  Anyway, is there currently any power source that can be used in a small rocket and just shoot it off into space and keep powering over months until it reaches the speed of light and see what happens? :cool:
• Random Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise

  August 2005

  Well, that "age old question" was answered about 80 years ago by Einstien's Special Theory of Relativity :D
• Freejack Jake the Not-so-Wise

  August 2005

  Looks like they are tweaking the phases of the electromagnetic waves to create a pulse that travels faster than light. This is a very important concept that could someday be applied in FTL communications. I believe someone had done something similar a few years ago with electric pulses using long and short sections of coax cable.
  
  
  On the idea of pushing a rocket toward the speed of light, the fuel require to push a conventional rocket that faster would literarly be unimaginable.
  
  Jake
• sleepy_shadow Ranger

  August 2005

  As far as I understand, this concept has been known for a while, and unfortunately... more informed people seem of the opinion... that a wave achieving above-C group velocity does not enable information to travel faster than light.
  
  I personally tried thinking about it... but lost my frame of reference in the tangled accounting. So I can't really tell for sure.
• Messiah Failed Experiment

  August 2005

  What they are saying is that if they slow down parts of the group, other parts of that group will go faster than the first parts, and therefore travel faster than those..
  
  Mumbojumbo!
• Sanfam I like clocks.

  August 2005

  [QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Messiah [/i]
  [B]What they are saying is that if they slow down parts of the group, other parts of that group will go faster than the first parts, and therefore travel faster than those..
  
  Mumbojumbo! [/B][/QUOTE]
  
  Nay! (partially)
  
  They're saying that by slowing down parts of the group, a greater signal, an amplified "wave," a spike caused by the alignment of the peaks and valleys of the individual waves, will travel faster because the alignment spike is simply going to occur wherever the waves form that same configuration. Slowing down key waves to delay or advance this spike is easy enough. :p
• Messiah Failed Experiment

  August 2005

  Ok, Im not that well versed in physics anymore (and never was), but heres my translation of the page:
  
  [quote]This seeming paradox can be resolved because a pulse of light is actually made up of many separate frequency components, each of which moves at their own velocities. This is known as the pulse’s phase velocity. If all the frequency components have the same phase velocity, then the overall pulse will also appear to move at that velocity.[/quote]
  
  Light is made up of several waves (as are all non-sine waves), if all of the waves move in the same velocity, then that velocity is the average velocity (duh)..
  
  [quote]However, if the components have different phase velocities, then the pulse’s overall velocity will depend on the relationships between the velocities of the separate components. If the velocities differ, the pulse is said to be moving at the group velocity.[/quote]
  
  If the waves move in defferent velocities, then the group velocity is the same as the average velocity of those waves..
  
  [quote]By tweaking the relationship between phase velocities, it’s possible to adjust the group velocity and create the illusion that parts of the pulse are traveling faster than the speed of light[/quote]
  
  If you slow down some of the waves, the waves that move faster, move faster than the group velocity (i.e. average velocity), and thus seem to move faster than light..
  
  Am I missing something?
• Freejack Jake the Not-so-Wise

  August 2005

  I don't think that it quite like that, going back to Sanfam's post, I believe by varing the relationship of of mulitple waves, you create points along the "transmission route" at which all the waves align or peak. Manipulation of these relationships relative to each other causes those peaks to travel down the transmission path, therefore traveling faster than the transmission itself. The caveat here is the the electrmagntic ways do not actually travel faster than light, only the pulses on those waves...
  
  Jake