OT: there are apparently other ways of doing that now.
Light Exceeds Its Own Speed Limit, or Does It? nytimes.com
The speed at which light travels
through a vacuum, about 186,000
miles per second, is enshrined in physics
lore as a universal speed limit. Nothing can
travel faster than that speed, according
freshman textbooks and conversation at
sophisticated wine bars; Einstein's theory of
relativity would crumble, theoretical physics
would fall into disarray, if anything could.
Two new experiments have demonstrated
how wrong that comfortable wisdom is.
Einstein's theory survives, physicists say, but
the results of the experiments are so mind-bending and weird that the
easily unnerved are advised--in all seriousness--not to read beyond this
point.
In the most striking of the new experiments a pulse of light that enters a
transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas is pushed
to speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light. That is so fast that,
under these peculiar circumstances, the main part of the pulse exits the far
side of the chamber even before it enters at the near side.
And so on. Meanwhile, here in the land of cheese and frozen tundra, we've just set a record for May precipitation. Go figure.
Cheers, Dan. |
