INCONSTANT SPEED OF LIGHT IN VACUUM: NO PROBLEM FOR EINSTEIN?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/p...y-speed-light/
Jennifer Ouellette: "The experiment showed that it is possible for light to travel at a slower speed even in free space - and Padgett and his colleagues did it at the scale of individual photons. (...) To the researchers' surprise, the light continued to travel at the slightly slower speed even after leaving the confines of the mask. (...) University of Rochester physicist Robert Boyd, while impressed with the group's ingenuity and technical achievement, calmly took the news in stride. "I'm not surprised the effect exists," he told Science News. "But it's surprising that the effect is so large and robust." His nonchalance might strike non-physicists as strange: Shouldn't this be momentous news poised to revolutionize physics? As always, there are caveats. When it comes to matters of light speed, it's important to read the fine print. In this case, one must be careful not to confuse the speed at which light travels, which is just a feature of light, with its central role in special relativity, which holds that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference. If Galileo measures the speed of light, he gets the same answer whether he is lounging at home in Pisa or cruising in a horse-drawn carriage. The same goes for his trusty assistant. This still holds true, centuries later, despite the exciting news out of Glasgow last month."

So light is slowed in a vacuum but this is not "momentous news poised to revolutionize physics"? No problem for Divine Albert's Divine Theory? Einsteinians? Have you been practicing crimestop for half a year already?

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter2.9.html
"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story...ut-touching-it
"Although the maximum speed of light is a cosmological constant - made famous by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and E=mc^2 - it can, in fact, be slowed down: that's what optics do."

In Big Brother's world: Although 2+2=5 is an absolute truth - made famous by Big Brother's Big Theory - 2+2=4 is also true: that's what arithmetics say.

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter1.7.html
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

Pentcho Valev

There have been countless reports of speeds higher than the speed of light but Einsteiniana's profiteers either sent them to oblivion or forced the authors to admit that Divine Albert's Divine Theory remains gloriously unaffected:

http://www.electrogravityphysics.com..._of_light.html
"SCIENTISTS claim they have broken the ultimate speed barrier: the speed of light. In research carried out in the United States, particle physicists have shown that light pulses can be accelerated to up to 300 times their normal velocity of 186,000 miles per second. (...) Exact details of the findings remain confidential because they have been submitted to Nature, the international scientific journal, for review prior to possible publication. (....) This weekend Wang said he could not give details but confirmed: "Our light pulses did indeed travel faster than the accepted speed of light. I hope it will give us a much better understanding of the nature of light and how it behaves." (...) Neil Turok, professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University, said he awaited the details with interest, but added: "I doubt this will change our view of the fundamental laws of physics."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/faster-t...peed-of-light/
July 19, 2000: "For generations, physicists believed there is nothing faster than light moving through a vacuum -- a speed of 186,000 miles per second. But in an experiment in Princeton, N.J., physicists sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering. The pulse traveled 310 times the distance it would have covered if the chamber had contained a vacuum. Researchers say it is the most convincing demonstration yet that the speed of light -- supposedly an ironclad rule of nature -- can be pushed beyond known boundaries, at least under certain laboratory circumstances. (...) The results of the work by Wang, Alexander Kuzmich and Arthur Dogariu were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../406277a0.html
Nature 406, 277-279 (20 July 2000): "...a light pulse propagating through the atomic vapour cell appears at the exit side so much earlier than if it had propagated the same distance in a vacuum that the peak of the pulse appears to leave the cell before entering it."

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-fast-faster.html
"Scientists in PML's Quantum Measurement Division have produced the first superluminal light pulses made by using a technique called four-wave mixing, creating two separate pulses whose peaks propagate faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. (...) NIST scientists emphasized that, while the information detection could be advanced, no information could actually travel faster than the speed of light and that, consequently, principles like causality in special relativity were always respected in these experiments."

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Light...d-267499.shtml
"The technique developed at NIST is called four-wave mixing, and it works by altering some parts of each individual light pulse. This makes the light move forward faster than it normally would when traveling through a vacuum.. (...) The physicists explain that the new research does not violate Albert Einstein's theory on general relativity - which states that the speed of light in a vacuum is the fastest achievable in the Universe. They say that a sort of loophole exists in this theory. By careful tuning of the light source and advanced calculations, it is possible to nudge portions of the light pulses so that they arrive at their destination ahead or behind the main pulse. (...) With four-wave mixing, the NIST investigators produced laser pulses that arrived at their destination a full 50 nanoseconds faster than photons traveling through a vacuum."

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/05/di...peed-of-light/
"According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, light travelling in a vacuum is the universal speed limit. That's a well-established rule - but it is one that scientists like to flirt with the idea of breaking. Including researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who have been trying to exploit a loophole in the rule, that could see something travel faster than light. That thing is information, and the loophole relies on forcing one pulse to propagate through a second one. If the second pulse is moving at a speed close to the speed of light, it should in theory be possible to make the first one travel faster than the speed of light. Which is pretty much exactly what the researchers from NIST have done, if you read their paper in Physical Review Letters. (...) So yes, something did move faster than the speed of light, and it was real this time. And, yes, it is impressive in a very abstract physical science kinda way, but it's not going to turn Einstein's theory on its head, nor revolutionise physics. So I wouldn't get too excited."

http://phys.org/news182671620.html
"Astrophysicists, led by Frederick Jenet of the University of Texas at Brownsville, have been monitoring a pulsar, PSR B1937+21, which is about 10,000 light years from Earth. (...) They found that pulses closer to the center arrived earlier than the normal timing, which suggests they had travelled faster than the speed of light. (...) The faster-than-light pulses do not violate Einstein's theory because technically the pulse carries no information."

https://www.newscientist.com/article...basic-lab-kit/
"Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department. Scientists have sent light signals at faster-than-light speeds over the distances of a few metres for the last two decades - but only with the aid of complicated, expensive equipment. Now physicists at Middle Tennessee State University have broken that speed limit over distances of nearly 120 metres, using off-the-shelf equipment costing just $500. (...) While the peak moves faster than light speed, the total energy of the pulse does not. This means Einstein's relativity is preserved, so do not expect super-fast starships or time machines anytime soon."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-ltt081905.php
"This is exactly what the EPFL team has demonstrated. Using their Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) method, the group was able to slow a light signal down by a factor of 3.6, creating a sort of temporary "optical memory." They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn't move over - relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected."

Pentcho Valev