Researchers in Switzerland have successfully demostrated for the first time that it is possible to control the speed of light, both slowing it down and speeding it up, in an optical fiber.......

Although this could have important implications that range from optical computing to fibre optic telecomunications, i feel as if this news hasnt been so outbreaking as i thought it would be.....

www.physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/8/13/1

I am skeptical of the finding. There's no plausible mechanism given by which the speed of light might be exceeded. The slowing of the speed of like is old hat. It's not slowing; it's haing light do other things besides just propagating. Light still travels at the speed of light, and unless these guys explain themselves better, it still doesn't go any faster, either.

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http://members.elirion.net/~maddad
There are ten kinds of people. Those that understand binary, and those that do not.

Pfui on the speed of light...

Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks...

Ever wonder what the speed of lightning would be if it didn't zigzag?

OK, so what's the speed of dark?

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"If a tree is cut down in the rainforest, and is used to make paper to print a book, and the book is really bad, and there's nobody that will read it, do you still hear a sucking sound?"
Charlie in Dayton, A.AsC.

i read the article a month or so ago... the "speed up" was really a signal processing "cheat" that measured the group velocity... slowing it down has been demonstrated before, i believe. the article i read also went on to say that (paraphrased) "data can't be transmitted faster than the speed of light because it can't be processed fast enough due to technology limitations" which is pure hokum. the velocity of a link has nothing to do with the rate of information transfer, which is all the processing need do. i think that was the author putting in his own two cents... but maybe not.

if they can figure out a way to send data at FTL speeds, i'm on board. lots of opportunities for the communications industry.

taks

edit: for the record, this is not the same article i read a while back, though it is the same experiment.

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

Toseeked.

This was the result that had me spitting and fuming about these guys claiming to be the first to do this when the group I was working with published the same thing months ago. I've since learned that they did publish some of their work in an obscure journal a month before us, but they still should have cited our work. They were probably trying get back at us for not citing their work.

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Old laser physicists never die, they just become incoherent.
These days, every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what a photon is, but he is wrong. - Albert Einstein

They certainly should have, but its probably as you said, they were trying to get back for not citing their work........

Sending data at FTL speeds! I think you could be waiting awhile..............

You should get banned for bumping a two month old article just to say, "me too." It's rude. Everybody else has already seen this thread, and now we have to reload the whole thing and we find that nothing has been added to it. Most people don't have hours and hours to spend on the forum, but they want to keep up with the discussions that go on here. So, they come in and look over the threads with new activity - now you come along and give them another thread to look at, but one with no new activity. It's just plain rude.

If you have something to say, and in this case it looks like you didn't, then you should start a new thread and link to the old one. If you just want to babble and say "me too" there is a designated place for doing that. Go up to the babbling forum and "me too" to your heart's content. But in the serious forums, please stop making old, dead threads appear on top of new threads.

I haven't!

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov

oh that's just great. thanks a lot for the support.

You're welcome, old chap. ^_^

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov

tofu, just do what a few of us have done. Put jkmccrann on your ignore list.

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

ok. good advice.