Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

[FoolKiller]

Sci-fi geeks have accepted faster-than-light communication forever, whether it be Star Trek's sub-space signals or Orson Scott Card's Ansible, but the reality is that it has been thought to be impossible...until now.

Someone has figured out a way to move radio waves faster than light, so science fiction style communication may be possible. It also appears to have many other possible uses, like the medical field.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/06/30/device-makes-radio-waves-travel-faster-than-light/

Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light
Written by Nancy Atkinson

Polarization Synchrotron. Credit: Singleton, et al., via Current.com

A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light. Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but phenomena like radio waves are a different story, said John Singleton, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists.

Singleton said the polarization synchrotron basically abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. This may be what happens in pulsars, as well.

"Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves in pulses, but what we don't know is why these pulses are so bright or why they travel such long distances," Singleton said. "What we think is these are transmitting the same way our machine does."

The device consists of a 2 meter-long gently curving arc of alumina (a dielectric material), with a series of electrodes fitted at regular intervals along its length. Applying a sinusoidal voltage across each electrode and displacing the phase of the voltage very slightly from one electrode to the next generates a sinusoidally-varying polarization pattern that moves along the device. By carefully adjusting the frequency of the voltage and the phase displacement the researchers say they can make the wave travel at greater than the speed of light. However no physical quantity of charge travels faster than light speed.

And beyond explaining what has been a bit of a mystery to the astronomical community, Singleton's discovery could have wide-ranging technological impacts in areas such as medicine and communications, he said.

"Because nobody's really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field," Singleton said.

One possible use for faster than light radio waves — which are packed into a very powerful wave the size of a pencil point — could be the creation of a new generation of cell phones that communicate directly to satellites, rather than transmitting through relay towers as they now do.

Those phones would have more reliable service and would also be more difficult for hackers to intercept, Singleton said.

Speedy radio waves could also revolutionize the computing industry. Data could be transferred more quickly, and if used in semiconductors, it would mean faster caches and the ability to communicate across separate pieces of silicon nearly instantly.

In the health field, faster than light radio waves could be in extremely targeted chemotherapy, where a patient takes the drugs, and the radio waves are used to activate them very specifically in the area around a tumor, Singleton said.

Another interesting thought I had for this is that if there are other intelligent species out there that are slightly more advanced than us, but not to a point of faster-than-light travel, could we achieve first contact via communication, not exploration?

I don't know just how fast these radio waves can move, but could we contact intelligences 1,000 light years away before our first radio broadcasts ever reach them? Would being able to communicate with them allow us to share knowledge and cause our technology to grow by leaps and bounds?

Or could this kind of radio wave be the thing an extremely advance species is waiting for before making first contact (Think warp signatures to Vulcans in Star Trek)?

Or do I read too many books and watch too much TV/movies?

 

[TrievelA7X]

Neat. Don't know what else to say.
EDIT: Got something.
It says it abuses the radio waves until they travel faster than light. Do the waves remain intact? And what speed exactly do they travel?

 

[Omnis]

So does the wavelength stays the same or what? Maybe this technology can replace the gamma knife.

 

[FoolKiller]

So does the wavelength stays the same or what? Maybe this technology can replace the gamma knife.

From the article:

One possible use for faster than light radio waves — which are packed into a very powerful wave the size of a pencil point

 

[Omnis]

Yeah but what is that supposed to mean? They turn large radio waves into ETF waves or something? How are you supposed to measure the size of a wave that's going faster than light when the formula for measurement measures by the speed of light?

 

[Zembla]

So does the wavelength stays the same or what? Maybe this technology can replace the gamma knife.

They use a bunch of power sources in different phases on the same frequency apparently to give the signal a sinusoidal characteristic. If this is so, they can modify the frequency, modifying the frequency would increase the wave's velocity (v= f * lambda, with lambda being wavelength, and f being the frequency).

So, I'd guess they're keeping one of them constant. Or, I could be wrong entirely, and they could be trying to speed up the waves by both modifying the frequency and the wavelength of it.

-Z

 

[BobK]

You can demonstrate faster-than-speed-of-light communication yourself, using nothing more sophisticated than a flashlight. Shine the light at a wall, near a corner., Now with a flick of the wrist, move the beam to the opposite corner. It went pretty fast, didn't it? Double the distance between you and the wall, and you'll see that the spot moved across the wall twice as fast for the same speed wrist flick. Keep moving the wall away (might help to make it bigger too), and you'll reach a point at which the beam moves across the wall at a speed greater than lightspeed.

Read through the description of how that thing works and you'll see that it's essentially doing the same thing.

 

[wfooshee]

And the result of that is that the spot the beam lands on may traverse the wall faster than light, but no individual photon went faster than light.

(Would that mean that there are spots on the wall that never actually see the beam? The photons can't spill out of the flashlight fast enough to keep the wall lit as the beam goes by?)

In the spot-on-the-wall analogy, the spot (the effect of the device) may traverse the wall faster than light, but no information travelled faster than light. Nothing was put onto that beam at the starting point that can be seen by the ending point.

 

[GT4 genius]

You can demonstrate faster-than-speed-of-light communication yourself, using nothing more sophisticated than a flashlight. Shine the light at a wall, near a corner., Now with a flick of the wrist, move the beam to the opposite corner. It went pretty fast, didn't it? Double the distance between you and the wall, and you'll see that the spot moved across the wall twice as fast for the same speed wrist flick. Keep moving the wall away (might help to make it bigger too), and you'll reach a point at which the beam moves across the wall at a speed greater than lightspeed.

Read through the description of how that thing works and you'll see that it's essentially doing the same thing.

I dont think anything is going faster than light in that experiment.

@ The original post, I have a very pessimistic doubt about this. It seems that they've somehow practically broken the speed of light, but somehow technically they haven't, and in a sence just cheated the speed of light (c).
I opened this thread expecting to find some break through with some experimental quantum entanglement idea which I would of been a lot more hopeful for, again in that case not actually breaking c but rather by-passing it.

 

[Exorcet]

This whole concept is kind of old actually. And as said above, the speed of light isn't really being surpassed.

Think of it like this, a sound message cannot exceed the speed of sound, however, if you placed a lot of people right next to each other in a line and these people had very sharp sense and reflexes, you could shout a message at the first person and have every following person shout the message at nearly the same time. The message would reach the end of the line far faster than sound.

That's how I heard it explained anyway.

 

[mmfiore]

An interesting comment from the scientist? "Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. I wonder if this is a quote from Singleton. It does not sound like a
technically sound scientific explanation. We have a better explanation that also uses High Magnetics. The Theory of Super Relativity has been predicting this for years now. Come to the website and read how to build Spatial Bias Drive. We call it the Slip Wave Drive. This device creates the Slip Wave Field which is the one and only way to travel faster than light. Read the article "How to Build a Warp Drive using SR Theory.

We are a group that is challenging the current paradigm in physics which is
Quantum Mechanics and String Theory. There is a new Theory of Everything
Breakthrough. It exposes the flaws in both Quantum Theory and String Theory. Please Help us set the physics community back on the right course and prove that Einstein was right! Visit our site The Theory of Super Relativity: www.superrelativity.org

 

[Keef]

In the spot-on-the-wall analogy, the spot (the effect of the device) may traverse the wall faster than light, but no information travelled faster than light. Nothing was put onto that beam at the starting point that can be seen by the ending point.

Photons would get there eventually though. What you would probably end up with is an oblong-shaped spot, which doesn't look like it's moving anymore. It'd be like when you move a salt shaker slowly it piles up into a "spot", but when you move it fast it covers the same surface area, but it's spread out more evenly.

 

[TrievelA7X]

And the result of that is that the spot the beam lands on may traverse the wall faster than light, but no individual photon went faster than light.

(Would that mean that there are spots on the wall that never actually see the beam? The photons can't spill out of the flashlight fast enough to keep the wall lit as the beam goes by?)

In the spot-on-the-wall analogy, the spot (the effect of the device) may traverse the wall faster than light, but no information travelled faster than light. Nothing was put onto that beam at the starting point that can be seen by the ending point.

For the beam to move faster than light, the light couldn't keep up, and therefore the beam on the wall wouldn't be travelling faster than light, just skipping part of the race, yes?