speed of light

[b-real]

I have also heard of an ex periment that used compressed gas, ions wear shot threw the gas and came out the other side at 300 time faster than speed of light. Science was not sure if this occured because the ions bounce of each other, the ions wear used as a pulse. If only one ion was sent threw would it have the same result? Bill Nye was on the news in 2000 commenting on this.

[newtron]

Who is science? I don't think I've met him/her.

[ugly_bob]

any links so we can have a look and see exactly what you're talking about?

[jake-the-peg]

I'm not sure if this is what you mean but although the speed of light iann a vacuum is limited the speed of light in a material such as water may be considerably less than this.

Particles from radioactive decays can be made to travel through a material at speeds faster than light in that material when that happens you get light emitted which is where the blue glow associated with some nuclear reactors comes from.

This is called Cherenkov radiation after the Russian physicist who won the 1958 Nobel prize for discovering it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiati on

[eifionlewis]

It is not possible for an object to travel faster than the speed of light, what you are talking about is group velocity, which is different from a single particle exceeding the speed of light.

While i am not a physicist, i do understand that as spacial velocity increases, temporal velocity decreases. Put more simply, as you speed up, time slows down. Small increases in speed do not illustrate this but huge increases do. Speed of light travel brings time almost to a standstill from the particle perspective, so anything travelling faster than this would approach zero temporal velocity. Theoretically, a particle travelling at 300 times the speed of light would be travelling backward through time, and would by definition, not exist.

The experiment you describe involves the knock on effect of all of the gas particles amplifying a signal, like as if in a line of dominoes each domino was to begin falling before the previous domino made contact due to something in between being pushed into the next domino. Thus the final domino in the line would fall faster than if it were performed under normal conditions.

I'm starting to confuse myself now so i'm going to stop here!!