Article: Photons flout the light speed limit

On 19 Aug, 17:32, Dono wrote:
On Aug 19, 1:46 am, Jerry wrote:
On Aug 19, 1:50 am, "Timo A. Nieminen" wrote:

On Sat, 18 Aug 2007, Jerry wrote:
On Aug 18, 7:51 pm, "Timo A. Nieminen" wrote:
On Sat, 18 Aug 2007, Jerry wrote:
Although the total path length is the same, the total distance
through Perspex is different in the prisms closed versus prisms
separated scenarios.

Yes, but those are not the two cases being compared. The
comparison is between the reflected and the tunnelled pulses.

Yes, and the claim is that the difference in received time
between reflected and tunneled pulses is a constant 100 ps
regardless of the amount of separation of the two prisms.

The difference is stated as "received by the detectors at the
same time", no error bars being mentioned at all. Sloppy!

What the 100ps is, who can tell? That's about 3cm path length,
about the wavelength. What might a "measured time delay" of
100ps be? Sloppy again!

A receiver for the reflected pulses is not illustrated, but
implied. I would presume that differential FTIR depending
on the degree of separation of the two prisms would affect
the total transit time from transmitter to receiver of the
reflected pulse as well, depending on whether the prisms
are closed or separated. Is my presumption correct?

It depends on what is being measured. In the gap, the phase is
almost uniform, so the phase at the far end is approximately
the phase at the near end (basically, this is why you get
superluminal tunnelling, and also why it's no more SR-cracking
than superluminal phase speeds in waveguides), so the speed is
(neglecting effects due to the reflected evanescent mode)
independent of the gap width. Since there is no mention of the
gap width in the paper, or whether it was varied or not, who
can tell (a reason (d) the paper deserves rejection!)?

In wave guides, phase velocity and group velocity are inversely
related. Near the cutoff frequency, phase velocity approaches
infinity, group velocity approaches zero, and attenuation
losses approach infinity. Does an analogous relationship govern
superluminal tunneling in FTIR?

If, as you previously stated, "Moving the receiving antenna
parallel to the prism will _not_ change the time delay", then
why provide the adjustment at all?

If they have a wide gap, then it might be necessary. Increase
the gap, shift the tunnelled beam. If you don't shift the
receiver to match, then you have an automatic fudge-factor.
Better to shift the receiver to match the shifted beam.

The beam is over 10 wavelengths across, and the gap(s) employed
would probably have been less than a wavelength. If the beam
were truly uniform and parallel (i.e. coming from a source at
effectively "infinite" distance), then no receiver shift should
have been necessary. The source of the EM being received by
the receiver would simply have shifted to a different part of
the incoming beam.

A need to shift the receiver would be indicative of the source
beam -not- being uniform and parallel, implying further that
the experiment as performed suffered from the sort of geometric
artifacts that I have outlined.

My suspicion is that separation of the prisms without adjusting
the position of the receiving antenna resulted in a -reduction-
of the measured time delay between reflected and transmitted
pulses due to the geometric artifacts that I believe exist in
the experiment.

The experiment is so briefly reported that one cannot tell
whether it might be valid. There are certainly valid experiments
one could do that would give the reported result, the standard
superluminal tunneling experiments. Again, why fudge the
experiment when there are genuine experiments that give results
that can be ambiguously reported to the same end?

A properly conducted and correctly interpreted experiment would
not have yielded the desired results.

Jerry

Jerry and Timo

Excellent analysis , congratulations ! I suggest that you two combine
forces and you write a rebuttal to Nimtz. He's been doing this for
years, no one took the trouble to take him seriously and take apart
his "experiments".

Two zombies are not enough. At least six bellicose zombies should
combine forces - e.g. Dirk Moortel, Sam Wormley, Eric Gisse and Jeckyl
should be added to Jerry and Timo and of course Master Tom Roberts
should be the leader of the group. The problem is that experts have
confirmed Nimtz's results, only the interpretations are different:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-lst081607.php
"Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of
Toronto, Canada, doesn't dispute Nimtz and Stahlhofen's results.
However, Einstein can rest easy, he says. The photons don't violate
relativity: it's just a question of interpretation. Steinberg explains
Nimtz and Stahlhofen's observations by way of analogy with a 20-car
bullet train departing Chicago for New York. The stopwatch starts when
the centre of the train leaves the station, but the train leaves cars
behind at each stop. So when the train arrives in New York, now
comprising only two cars, its centre has moved ahead, although the
train itself hasn't exceeded its reported speed. "If you're standing
at the two stations, looking at your watch, it seems to you these
people have broken the speed limit," Steinberg says. "They've got
there faster than they should have, but it just happens that the only
ones you see arrive are in the front car. So they had that head start,
but they were never travelling especially fast."

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/a...w/31704765.cms
"Does fasterthan-light speeding up of photons violate Einstein's
theory of relativity? "I don't think so," Dr Chiao said. While
individual particles may travel faster than the conventional speed of
light, he maintained that it was not possible to transmit a message at
superluminal speeds. "Our experiments do not mean that you can send a
signal faster than light," he explained. "Only a few photons get
through the barrier. Because tunneling is probabilistic, we have no
way of knowing which ones they will be. So, it would not be possible
to send any useful information"....The Nobel laureate Brian Josephson
put it a little differently: "The new speeds given for photons are in
excess of the current value for the speed of light in air, but they
are still light photons. So clearly, we are dealing with the speed of
light-only faster light. The discovery throws more light on the
bizarre and relatively unknown quantum world". Dr Chiao heartily
agreed."

Pentcho Valev