Faster than Superman and the speed of light.

PreacherTom writes "Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in


Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have [0]broken the speed of light.


For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of


laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that propagates about 300 times


faster than light would travel in a vacuum. The pulse seemed to exit the


chamber even before entering it." This research was published in Nature,


so presumably it was peer-reviewed. It's impossible from the CBC story to


determine what is being claimed. First of all they get the physics wrong


by asserting that Einstein's special relativity only decrees that matter


cannot exceed the speed of light. Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of


light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information


cannot be transferred faster than this limit. What exactly the


researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this


point by subscribers to Nature.





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