Well, maybe not quite yet. But, Albert’s place in the pantheon of godlike science may be in jeopardy if a pair of German physicists’ claim turns out to be true.
Yesterday, Dr. Gunter Nimtz and Dr. Alfons Stahlhofen made the claim that, within a controlled laboratory setting, they have broken the speed of light. If true, science has just rewritten everything we ever knew about physics.
For nearly 90 years we have been living under the assumption that Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity was the glue that held our feable little lives together. The amount of energy it would require to move any thing greater than 186,000 miles/second was just far too staggering for even the greatest scientific minds to fathom and so, the world and how we live and operate has been ruled by that little, but groundbreaking theory called E = mc².
The two scientists, who work at the University of Koblenz, believe their experiements prove that they have been able to climb over that limiting wall of Einstein’s famous theory.
Their experiment uses microwave photons as “energetic packets of light.” These “packets” travelled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved as much as three feet apart. Like most great discoveries, this one occurred quite by surprise while the scientists were investigating “quantum tunnelling,” or what we geeks like to call “the Stargate effect.” This phenomenon was being explored because, on paper it suggested that atomic particles might be able to break what has been assumed to be “unbreakble laws,” such as Einsteins long-held 186,000 miles/second barrier.
Both doctors are quick to remind everyone that there is still a lot of work to be done before this pans out to be as landmark as they hope it will. In an article for the New Scientist Magazine, Nimtz said, “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.” As much as I like New Scientist, I would have loved to have seen something in either Scientific American, the American Institute of Physics or the International Journal of Modern Physics to lend some weight to this discovery.
Years of more testing, validation and experimentation under the strictist of scientific paramenters and benchmarks will need to be completed and verified before we begin sending spaceships on faster-than-light journeys — but every journey begins with the first step, and this could well be that very first baby-step to realizing the dream of every scifi writer and genre-lover that has ever lived.
Actually, I would say that this could potentially a first step in FTL communications, but I can’t really see this as any form of progress towards FTL travel, unless of course you want to be converted into light first.