I remember hearing somewhere that scientists have been able to make lasers travel faster than the speed of light. Is this true?

Short answer: No

Long answer: Light seems to travel like this: ---===---. What the scientists did was change it to this ----====- part of the way between the detectors. The sensors don't register until the thicker part (the ===) hit, so by pushing it forward, it seems like the light is travelling faster.

However, nothing ever travelled faster than light. If you could somehow encode data in the ==='s, then you would have broken the lightspeed barrier, however that is impossible due to unhappy quantum mechanical/phsyical issues.

The same thing goes for J Bell's Theorm. He stated that if you seperate a quantum entangled particle into two pieces, and you change the spin of one of those pieces, the other piece's spin will instantly change as well. This works regardless of distance.

However, the Uncertaintly Principle won't let you encode data that way because the act of observing the new spin will also change the spin.

__________________
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Wedgebert, you best qualify that with "in a vacuum". Things can move faster than light in other mediums. Every hear of Cherenkov Radiation?

__________________
Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

How far to get down into semantics? Light "in other mediums" is a misnomer - light doesn't travel slower than C in mediums it travels from one atom to the next, with pauses as it is absorbed and re-emitted. The net effect is a macroscopic APPEARANCE of slower speed, but photons themselves always travel at exactly C.

How about this, on a macroscopic scale the group velocity is less when moving through a medium other than a vacuum? Or should I mention the refractive index?

__________________
Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

Is it correct to state that the speed of light is an absolute?

It seems to me that we have ironical serendipity because in an effort to measure the absolute ether by measuring the supposed different net speed of light through the ether (Michelson-Morley), that light (it's speed) became absolute [I suppose] and the ether became superfluous.

__________________
Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.