My bicycle is faster than the speed of light

[Littleenki]

Professor Lena Hau, has showed us the speed of light is never constant...



Does this debunk the Einsteinian constant?

Who's next...Planck?
Le

[PLAYSWITHMACHINES]

According to conventional physics this is at the same time possible & impossible
Light=Time
So is this a means of stopping time?
Time travel?
This has been linked to light before by another scientist.....
Wow! At the same time, i've got 'ray of light' by Madonna on the TV
How cool is that?
Interesting possibilities in this thread, methinks...

[dcooper]

Light= Time, funny, When I was a kid I thought Light = Time, and if that is so than if we stop light we stop time or if we slow down light we slow down time. After all the reason why we see events is because of light, But this Time would not be real, and a diff. time (real time) will lead to real time travel. This was my thought when I was a kid, like somewhere in 7th or 8th grade. -dcooper

[PLAYSWITHMACHINES]

Dylan, how can we define time, except as movement?
If something stops moving, if is at absolute zero temp, then it is effectively frozen in time....
This is part of Schrodinger's dilemma....
OK i believe that light is not thr be-all & end-all of the universe, but at the same time i am always interested in how another viewpoint can add to mine, as it were..
Certainly far deeper than i first intended to go, when i first joined Pegasus!

[zorgon]

Light Speed Constant?

Horse hooey... besides this is old news

She slows down light in a cloud of atoms...

The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c.... 299,792,458 metres per second  approximately 186,282 miles per second.

The speed of light in glass   200,000 km/s

The phase velocity is important in determining how a light wave travels through a material or from one material to another. It is often represented in terms of a refractive index. The refractive index of a material is defined as the ratio of c to the phase velocity vp in the material: larger indices of refraction indicate lower speeds. The refractive index of a material may depend on the light's frequency, intensity, polarization, or direction of propagation; in many cases, though, it can be treated as a material-dependent constant. The refractive index of air is approximately 1.0003. Denser media, such as water,[ glass, and diamond, have refractive indexes of around 1.3, 1.5 and 2.4, respectively, for visible light. In exotic materials like Bose-Einstein condensates near absolute zero, the effective speed of light may be only a few meters per second. However, this represents absorption and re-radiation delay between atoms, as does all slower-than-c speeds in material substances. As an extreme example of this, light "slowing" in matter, two independent teams of physicists claimed to bring light to a "complete standstill" by passing it through a Bose-Einstein Condensate of the element rubidium, one team at Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., and the other at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also in Cambridge. However, the popular description of light being "stopped" in these experiments refers only to light being stored in the excited states of atoms, then re-emitted at an arbitrarily later time, as stimulated by a second laser pulse. During the time it had "stopped," it had ceased to be light. This type of behaviour is generally microscopically true of all transparent media which "slow" the speed of light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light


Time on earth Vs time in orbit

Time in orbit is different than time on Earth. Not by much but enough to measure   

[PLAYSWITHMACHINES]

There you have it, absorbtion & re-emission

Let them make it go backwards
According to conventional theory this would validate the 'time travel' phenomena of light.
Not the best theory, that one, but it's commonly accepted, which means it's probably wrong

The time vs orbit is true, GPS sats have to allow for this when sending & receiving, but you don't get to hear much of how they know this & where they are taking it...?

Go dig, boys, there's gold in them thar hills
(yuk yuk)

[Littleenki]

I think of Sodium and the first thing that comes to mind is a crystal of salt...crystal being the key word.

Whereas an actual crystal..like quartz is semi transparent and refractory, the possiblity of light being absorbed doesnt make sense to me, as when something is absorbed by definition, it becomes static within a certain substrate.

The light when it slows is reflecting about within the crystals of sodium and therefore isnt absorbed, but just slowed whilest it bounces around within the cloud of sodium itself, to finally come out the other side at a rate depending on the transparency, temperature wise, and refractory nature of it.

Like any crystal, the salt, or sodium becomes aligned a certain way when cooled to such a degree, and therefore has the ability to make it look like the light stays in a cohesive beam, when all it does is remain in the center of the slowly vibrating sodium atoms, staying as a beam and not turning to a "flash" shooting out every direction from the sodium atoms.

What it reminds me of is the dichroic glass I work with which shifts the light at an angle, splitting the beam into two distinct colors as it passes through the coated glass. Except the dichroic glass only operates on two wavelengths.

The sodium cloud holds the light beam in a cohesive line, which cant escape the cloud, and seems to slow down, but is just bouncing around in the beamwidth itself.

Im no physicist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night....

either that or Im dead wrong....

Cheers!
Le

[PLAYSWITHMACHINES]

Your analysis is very good, L.E.

The reasoning in conventional physics is, that light slows down (or is absorbed by orbiting electrons) and is re-released (at it's original speed) but at a lower wavelength, thus accounting for the energy loss when light 'speeds up again'
So you see, it never slows down at all, it merely gets held as a higher-energy electron.
Depending on what element the electron is part of,(like in a crystal lattice or a plasma) it can hold that extra energy for quite some time, especially if it is in a 'low energy state' i.e. frozen.

Elementary, my dear Dave

[Littleenki]

Light on pause, eh, Luke?

And hey, Im getting a Watson coat, and youll need a Holmes pipe!

If we ever get together for Halloween we know now what our costumes will be!LOL!

I have always pictured the crystal skulls as this type of latticework which could hold light at bay and use it for billions of calculations or memory storage...maybe this lady will be the one to make the first light computer, using light to keep bits and memory trapped within this lattice you speak of, instead of a hard drive..

The precursor to a quantum computer perhaps?

Cheers!
Dave

[PLAYSWITHMACHINES]

The precursor to a quantum computer perhaps?

Could be, a photon is way faster than an electron, which you can usually outrun at 10MPH
This is why present 'electronic' devices are reaching their limits.

Because it's the charge that flows, not the electrons, they just wander about in the general direction of the charge....

The question is, is charge itself faster than light? or do they have the same speed, does charge have the same speed as gravity, which may be 64 times faster than light?
Many questions still have to be answered here....

If we ever get together for Halloween we know now what our costumes will be!LOL!

You mean i made those Batman & Robin costumes for nothing?
LOL!

[Littleenki]

Batman and Robin? Oh no, Luke those are our regular every day lab uniforms...Watson and Holmes are for halloween!LOL!!!!