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Reversing And Accelerating The Speed Of Light
Space Daily ^ | Jul 25, 2006 | Staff Writers

Posted on 07/25/2006 10:13:18 AM PDT by Ben Mugged

Physicist Costas Soukoulis and his research group at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory on the Iowa State University campus are having the time of their lives making light travel backwards at negative speeds that appear faster than the speed of light.

~snip~ This backward-bending characteristic of metamaterials allows enhanced resolution in optical lenses, which could potentially lead to the development of a flat superlens with the power to see inside a human cell and diagnose disease in a baby still in the womb.

~snip~ In addition, Soukoulis and his University of Karlsruhe colleagues have also shown that both the velocity of the individual wavelengths, called phase velocity, and the velocity of the wave packets, called group velocity, are both negative, which Soukoulis said accounts for the ability of negatively refracted light to seemingly defy Einstein's theory of relativity and move backwards faster than the speed of light.

Elaborating, Soukoulis said, "When we have a metamaterial with a negative index of refraction at 1.5 micrometers that can disperse, or separate a wave into spectral components with different wavelengths, we can tune our lasers to play a lot of games with light. We can have a wavepacket hit a slab of negative index material, appear on the right-hand side of the material and begin to flow backward before the original pulse enters the negative index medium."

Continuing, he explained that the pulse flowing backward also releases a forward pulse out the end of the medium, a situation that causes the pulse entering the front of the material appear to move out the back almost instantly.

"In this way, one can argue that that the wave packet travels with velocities much higher than the velocities of light," said Soukoulis.

(Excerpt) Read more at spacedaily.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Technical
KEYWORDS: physics; science; speedoflight
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Einstein must be spinning like a top (all except his brain which wasn't buried with him).

Read the source article, this extract does not do it justice......

1 posted on 07/25/2006 10:13:19 AM PDT by Ben Mugged
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To: PatrickHenry

Ping.


2 posted on 07/25/2006 10:14:20 AM PDT by Junior (Identical fecal matter, alternate diurnal period)
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To: SuzyQue

bookmark


3 posted on 07/25/2006 10:21:58 AM PDT by SuzyQue (Remember to think.)
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To: Ben Mugged
"""In this way, one can argue that that the wave packet travels with velocities much higher than the velocities of light,"

All this means is that the shape of the wave changed. The velocity of energy propagaiton in any material is always less than c. Here they are simply talking about phase velocities which are related to wave shape, not energy propagation.

4 posted on 07/25/2006 10:27:09 AM PDT by spunkets
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To: Ben Mugged

Allow me to reply to this.










...there.


5 posted on 07/25/2006 10:37:25 AM PDT by Fighting Irish (Béagán agus a rá go maith)
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To: Ben Mugged
I would suspect they are just observing some lesser understood quantum mechanic, and mis-characterizing it.

I never was totally comfortable with the whole "Light is both a wave and a particle" explanation. Seemed like a similar cop-out to the whole dark matter idea when calculating the mass of the universe, or the entire understanding of 'strong' and 'weak' nuclear forces.
6 posted on 07/25/2006 10:40:58 AM PDT by FreedomNeocon (Success is not final; Failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts -- Churchill)
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To: Junior

Goofy, but hey ... I'll ping the list.


7 posted on 07/25/2006 10:41:30 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (The Enlightenment gave us individual rights, free enterprise, and the theory of evolution.)
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To: VadeRetro; Junior; longshadow; RadioAstronomer; Doctor Stochastic; js1138; Shryke; RightWhale; ...
SciencePing
An elite subset of the Evolution list.
See the list's explanation at my freeper homepage.
Then FReepmail to be added or dropped.

8 posted on 07/25/2006 10:42:35 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (The Enlightenment gave us individual rights, free enterprise, and the theory of evolution.)
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To: Ben Mugged

Give me a practical application that will help the common man.......in the next 7 years.


9 posted on 07/25/2006 10:44:52 AM PDT by Just another Joe (Warning: FReeping can be addictive and helpful to your mental health)
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To: Just another Joe
Give me a practical application that will help the common man.......in the next 7 years.

Read the article.

10 posted on 07/25/2006 10:46:58 AM PDT by js1138 (Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!")
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To: Fighting Irish

Very succinct. I concur.


11 posted on 07/25/2006 10:47:39 AM PDT by willgolfforfood
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To: js1138
I did, the only thing I see is the "superlens" that will allow looking into a cell. And they admit that the "superlens" is a long way off.

My original question stands.

12 posted on 07/25/2006 10:51:42 AM PDT by Just another Joe (Warning: FReeping can be addictive and helpful to your mental health)
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To: Ben Mugged

It's a little misleading to confuse the phase velocity with the velocity of light, though it's hard to explain the difference to someone who has not been formally trained in physics.


13 posted on 07/25/2006 10:51:44 AM PDT by Brilliant
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To: Fighting Irish

HA! I replied to this YESTERDAY!.........


14 posted on 07/25/2006 10:52:50 AM PDT by Red Badger (Is Castro dead yet?........)
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To: Just another Joe

Of what importance is your original question? What is so special about seven years?


15 posted on 07/25/2006 10:54:49 AM PDT by js1138 (Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!")
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To: Ben Mugged
"the ability of negatively refracted light to seemingly defy Einstein's theory of relativity and move backwards faster than the speed of light."

That's nothing. I had some stocks recently that moved backwards faster than the speed of light.

16 posted on 07/25/2006 10:55:54 AM PDT by robertpaulsen
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To: Brilliant

The phase velocity of a wave is the rate at which the phase of the wave propagates in space. This is the velocity at which the phase of any one frequency component of the wave will propagate. You could pick one particular phase of the wave (for example the crest) and it would appear to travel at the phase velocity. The phase velocity is given in terms of the wave's frequency and wave vector k by

v_\mathrm{p} = \frac{\omega}{k}

Note that the phase velocity is not necessarily the same as the group velocity of the wave, which is the rate that changes in amplitude (known as the envelope of the wave) will propagate.

The phase velocity of electromagnetic radiation may under certain circumstances exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, but this does not indicate any superluminal information or energy


17 posted on 07/25/2006 10:56:31 AM PDT by FreedomNeocon (Success is not final; Failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts -- Churchill)
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To: js1138
What is so special about seven years?

Because that's about the amount of time, IMO, that the comman man will wait for a revolutionary development, in even a trial environment.
After that it's forgotten about and loses funding.

18 posted on 07/25/2006 11:00:38 AM PDT by Just another Joe (Warning: FReeping can be addictive and helpful to your mental health)
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To: Ben Mugged

(Pointless tangent)

Reminds me of...

Prosecutor: "Did you check for breathing?"
Defendant: "No."
P: "Did you check his pulse?"
D: "No."
P: "Did you, in fact, do ANYTHING to confirm whether the victim was, in fact, deceased?"
D: "No."
P: "Then how could you know he was, in fact, deceased?"
D: "His brain was sitting in a jar on my desk."


19 posted on 07/25/2006 11:02:40 AM PDT by ctdonath2
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To: FreedomNeocon

Yeah, I understand that, but what kind of an analogy can you come up with that the average guy would understand?


20 posted on 07/25/2006 11:03:55 AM PDT by Brilliant
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