Posted by ketyung
on Aug/20/2007
at 4:53 am
Albert Einstein was once my idol when I was hot about physics, especially about his law of relativity and the constant speed of light, during my school time. But it seems like his theory about the speed of light is constant doesn’t hold through anymore. Now, scientists have found that light can travel faster than 186,000 miles per second or the constant C, which is the speed of light in Einstein’s famous equation.
We’ve learned from the movie “Back To The Future” that traveling faster than the speed of light will bring you to the future. Of course, scientists have been telling us, that it’s impossible for object in our massive world to be able to travel close to the speed of light. This is all being bound by the famous Einstein’s equation that our massive body simply needs extremely huge amount of energy, which is impossible to be found on earth, to accelerate to reach the speed of light. But in the kind of microscopic world, where those super tiny particles live, traveling close to the speed of light is possible.
Two German physicists have done something for the particle world that lets light overcome its own speed limit. The two scientists have created a strange phenomenon called “quantum tunnelling”, in which particles summon up the energy to cross an apparently uncrossable barrier.
Their experiments focused on the travel of microwave photons – energetic packets of light – through two prisms. When the prisms were moved apart, most photons reflected off the first prism they encountered and were picked up by a detector. But a few appeared to “tunnel” through a gap separating them as if the prisms were still held together. Although these photons had traveled a longer distance, they arrived at their detector at the same time as the reflected photons. This suggests that the transit between the two prisms was faster than the speed of light.
Sound travels through medium with different reflective indexes will alter its speed. Light speed does not change, remains constant everywhere as told by Einstein’s theory. But it seems to be Einstein’s theory doesn’t work under the quantum world. Doesn’t it hint that speed of light could be uncertain in the quantum world? I remember something called “Uncertainty Principle“. So, light speed could be uncertain too under the quantum world? The law of physics of the massive world doesn’t work under the quantum world ? My physics is rusty, leave it to the physicists to crack their head!
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