Eintstein WAS wrong!

Was Einstein wrong about the speed of light? Can it be broken? Some physicists claim to have done in the following experiment....

The experiment in question has a particle that travels from an emitter to a detector. During the time it takes to get from end to the other, it passes through some sort of substance. When the particle is timed, the travel time through the substance in the way, is LESS than the travel time that light would have taken for the same distance.

So the particle appears to be travelling faster than light.

Actually, it appears to be travelling faster than light in that medium, which we all know is perfectly possible.

However, certain questions raise their heads over this result.

The theory of Relativity actually says that no information can travel faster than light, in fact if you look further down my blog to the post on "Phase Velocity" and "Group Velocity" (June 25, 2005) you will find another, apparently similar, conflict there.

Having studied quantum mechanics, the concepts of Group Velocity and Phase Velocity are well known to me, as is the Tunnel Effect.

The "Tunnel Effect" is a quantum mechanical effect only. It's main use is in Josephson Junctions, transistors that use the effect. The effect is this: Under certain circumstances, particles that bounce against a wall, the particles sometimes go right through the wall, and the time it takes to do this seems to be immeasurable.

The present conflict arose because the particles these scientists used appeared to be travelling faster than light, because the particles were using the "Tunnelling Effect" to get through the suff that is in the way. What the particle is doing before and after the tunnelling is completely described by a wave equation known as 'Shrodinger's Equation'. BUT, during the tunnelling, the particle is described by a different wave function (in fact, it is an exponential curve) and therefore we can tell virtually nothing about it (as usually, the particle is in the middle of a solid piece of material), other than the fact the probability amplitude (the information needed to tell us where it IS) decreases exponentially.

Most physicists already agree it is a paradox, but the fact is that the particles are travelling in a medium (compare glass) whose speed of light there is LOWER than the speed of light in a vacuum, perhaps there is no paradox at all. Particles have, after all, been seen to travel faster than the light in that particular medium, giving rise to "Cerenkov Radiation". This effect is striking when one glimpses the water bath of a nuclear reactor, which appears to 'shine' blue. No, it is not a dye, but the electrons emitted by the core are travelling faster than the speed of light in the water, and the blue is the Cerenkov radiation emitted by them.

But the equations in this case, the equations of special relativity, tell us exactly WHY nothing can go faster than light in a vacuum. Is the particle in this particular experiment violating this? NO, because it is NOT travelling faster than light in a vacuum.

However, the experiment given is only a consequence of quantum mechanics, as an exhibition such as depicted , can only be demonstrated by the tunnelling effect, which is an effect that is only valid for particles in the atomic realm.

There are no implications here whatsoever that the same effect can be , nor ever will be, applied to material, macroscopic particles like a car, a dog, or tennis ball. ALL must conform to the equation that says that, for them, light speed (as in the speed of light in a vacuum) is, in fact, impossible.

Here's the proof - the simple consideration that the speed of light is the same, the following three equations simply came through from the math, where v = speed, T = Time, L=Length, m=mass. c, of course, is the speed of light in a vacuum. The "0" means each of these as measured when v = 0.

Please don't worry about the math, because the most important thing here is in equation 3, the last one.........


.......in the last equation, it is clear the mass increases the faster you go, because that thing in the "[]" is always increasing, and look what happens when v=c >>>>> m(v) becomes infinite!

Obviously this cannot happen, so particles can never travel at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Anyone who "thinks" this is untrue is invited to 'disprove' these equations, which were first studied by Fitzgerald and Lorentz, just before Einstein actually used them in his Special Relativity paper ", On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", in 1905.

If all this appears difficult, it is childsplay compared to the General Theory of Relativity (1915).

I think the reason why Physics is so dependent upon math is PATENTly obvious here.