Which limit ?
August 16th, 2007 by SecureCare“IT’S a speed record that is supposed to be impossible to break. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have propelled photons faster than the speed of light. This would be in direct violation of a key tenet of Einstein’s special theory of relativity that states that nothing, under any circumstance, can exceed the speed of light…The pair say they have now tunnelled photons “instantaneously” across a barrier of various sizes, from a few millimetres up to a metre. Their conclusion is that the photons traverse the barrier much faster than the speed of light. Full Slice
August 16th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Perhaps SETI should consider light messages.
August 16th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
And then there are these guys, which sounds a bit like one of Dean’s schemes:
“Ann Arbor (MI) - University of Michigan scientists have discovered a breakthrough way to utilize light in cryptography. The new technique can crack even complex codes in a matter of seconds. Scientists believe this technique offers much advancement over current solutions and could serve to foil national and personal security threats if employed.
The process involves extremely short pulses of coherent light being emitted and interacting with something called “quantum dots”. Quantum dots are mystic pieces of “science fluff” to most people as they’re difficult to understand: Basically, they are very small structures that are sensitive to very small changes. By adjusting the frequencies and phase shifting the light in a more complex system, the beam itself forms a kind of “optical network” with compute abilities as it passes by the quantum dots.
When the theorized device is constructed, one requiring potentially many thousands of quantum dots, the light beam itself will be encoded with the equivalent of a query, such as a factorization of a numbers. It is then “sent” by the quantum dot where all possible answers to the query are computed. The answer is then immediately “read” on the far side. By encoding sequence after sequence in this way, answers to even extremely complex problems, those which might take dozens of years to solve using modern high-end desktop computers today, can be computed in seconds.”
From tgdaily dot com.
August 21st, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Any FTL-seeming result is going to have to pass the test of whether the seeming FTL part is the result of interpretation, and if not, duplication by independent groups.
Ah, the quantum dot array. This is the reward for being both ahead of one’s time and also lazy: Someone else will go through all that work. Of course, the price one pays is that they don’t actually do the experiments you would do.