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As you loyal readers know, here at the _floss, we take Albert Einstein seriously. That’s why we were outraged to learn the other day that a couple of numbnut German physicists claim they’ve moved microwave photons faster than the speed of light!
Anyone who knows even a smidgeon of Einstein’s special theory of relativity knows that nothing, according to THE MAN, can travel faster than light. To travel that fast would mean, for instance, that if you were shot through space, you could theoretically arrive at your destination before you even left!
Einstein wrote that it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. But Drs. Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen now say they’ve got packets of light to travel “instantaneously” between two prisms standing 3 feet apart.
Outrageous? Maybe. I’m not sufficiently educated in the field of quantum tunneling to say. But I’ll put my money behind Einstein’s words.
Besides the theories, he was a very quotable man, as you all know. What follows is a list of some of my all-time favorites. Anyone want to add one that I’ve left off? Anyone able to dispel the numbnuts’ claim? Physicists, PLEASE step forward and show off your smarts.
- “If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”
- “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
- “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
- “It is my belief that the problem of bringing peace to the world on a supranational basis will be solved only by employing Gandhi’s method on a larger scale.”
- “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
- “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
- “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
- “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
- “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
- “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”
- “Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.”
- “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
- “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
- “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
- “A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.”
- “I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.”
- “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
Comments (23)
Comment
while it maybe possible to travel above th e speed the light - one has to wonder what consequences this could ultimately have on our environment.
The only possible benefit this could bring in a more advanced civilation is to possibly trace the beggining of the big bang or even the universe
posted by Seo on 8-17-2007 at 2:16 am
What, and no announcement about creating Cold Fusion and inventing a Perpetual Motion machine? And did you say they moved a packet of light three (yes 3!!!) feet??? I do that every time I turn on a flashlight. The Germans should stick to building cars.
posted by Bill on 8-17-2007 at 6:13 am
Hi
My knowledge of quantum tunneling is very, very rudimentary, but from what I understand, these Germans didn’t exactly speed particles up faster than the speed of light in a traditional sense (which would make Einstein very, very angry if he were alive still). Rather, imagine rolling a ball up a hill. It requires a certain amount of energy to actually get the ball up to, and over, the peak. BUT, as particles in quantum physics (like photons) can act like a wave, there is only a probability that they can be found in any particular place at any particular time, and a small, but real, chance they will be found somewhere else. Instead of actually rolling the ball over the hill, these scientists have observed the small, but real chance, that the ball ACTUALLY appeared on the other side of the hill without really expending the energy to push it over the top. Essentially, the photons took a shortcut. If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry- you can read a better explanation on the Wikipedia article on quantum tunneling.
So, the whole “breaking the speed of light” thing is misleading. All the particles actually traveled the same speed, but some (in a nutshell), traveled a shorter distance by “tunneling”.
Einstein is still right!
posted by Nick on 8-17-2007 at 6:34 am
One of my favorite quotes that I believe is his:
‘Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.’
posted by caitlen on 8-17-2007 at 7:00 am
“Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.”
“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
“God may be subtle, but He isn’t mean.”
And, as a grad student, my all-time favorite, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?”
posted by BeckyJ on 8-17-2007 at 7:06 am
Ledgend has it that in response to Einstein saying: “I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice” (also translated as “God does not play dice with the universe.”) Neils Bohr replied: “Albert, stop telling God what to do.”
Funny stuff…
posted by Ed Hands on 8-17-2007 at 7:24 am
“Relativity?
put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. put your hand on a hot girl for an hour, and it feels like a minute.”
ok so i added the ‘hot’ in girl but whatever.
He also wrote the president during the Manhattan project insisting we be the first country to develop a nuclear bomb. After Hiroshima and nagasaki(sp?) he wrote a 2nd letter claiming his first letter to be his lifes biggest mistake.
posted by Eric on 8-17-2007 at 7:55 am
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” - Albert Einstein.
posted by Barb on 8-17-2007 at 8:50 am
I read a lot about Einstein. If I’m not mistaken, he also said that if an object aquires the speed of light, it will become infinitely “dense”. I also believe theres a way to go the speed of light. I mean who are we to say we have it all figured out. Oh yeah, I was wondering, is it true that einstein coulnd not tie his shoes????
posted by John Brown on 8-17-2007 at 9:22 am
Photons can indeed travel faster than the speed of light, but the probabilities that they will do so are so small that they essentially cancel out when calculating their speed (at least that’s how I understood it). But don’t listen to me, pick up a copy of Richard Feynman’s QED. It’s confusing, but it’s great.
posted by David on 8-17-2007 at 9:38 am
I have a whiteboard in my office, for a whole year I put nothing but Einstien quotes-here are two of my favorites:
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy”
posted by TracyB on 8-17-2007 at 10:14 am
You could get something to travel faster than the speed of light… relativity.
Imagine a cup of coffee. Now, think of the surface of the coffee as space. Get a spoon and stir it around. Now place a coffee bean on the surface. It’ll be dragged around and around the spinning coffee.
From the bean’s perspective, it is not moving. It’s just being dragged around by the spinning space. From our perspective, it’s moving.
Expand this… get the space warping around and around so that it is moving near the speed of light… and then get the bean itself to move at a rate so that from an outside perspective, it’s moving faster than the speed of light!
You’re not breaking any laws, it’s just taking the relativity theory to actually break the speed of light.
posted by Chris on 8-17-2007 at 10:21 am
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
posted by Chris Thorpe on 8-17-2007 at 10:41 am
Quantum tunneling, and therefore “faster than light travel” occurs every moment within your body, but over much smaller distances. As explained above with the hill example, the ball is traveling through (or tunneling through) the hill instead of going over it.
posted by Eric on 8-17-2007 at 12:16 pm
I have this one on my outgoing emails:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
posted by Sonya on 8-17-2007 at 12:39 pm
“A question that sometimes makes me hazy: Am I or are the others crazy”
Last line in an episode of “Criminal Minds” that was on last night.
How fortuitous that you would broach the topic today while it is still fresh in my mind.
posted by Mike D on 8-17-2007 at 1:41 pm
Einstein was certainly a genius, but it is dangerous to assume that he was infallible. He was never very comfortable with quantum mechanics, and yet without our reliance on it, much of today’s technology would never have been created. In fact, looking over some of the above quotes, it seems that Einstein would find it abhorrent if we just blindly accept his theories as canon.
posted by Iris on 8-17-2007 at 6:54 pm
Einstein didn’t know his own phone number. He said he never had to call home, it was trivial information and he kept his mind open for more important thoughts. Einstein didn’t drive, when he needed a substitute driver to drive him home, the sub would have to ask someone other than Einstein for directions. Einstein could only point in the general direction and say, “It’s a blue house.” That doesn’t distract from him being a genius.
posted by Tdave on 8-18-2007 at 1:44 am
I’m reading all those quotes and I have to agree with #17. Einstein would not like complacency. He wouldn’t have been where he was if he just accepted what he would initially resolve and/or what other scientists were doing.
posted by ajadoniz on 8-18-2007 at 2:23 am
Einstein beleived that time travel would be possible if one fly faster than the speed of light.
While he may have been brilliant….he missed the mark on this one. he apparently did not consider that the relative positions of the earth and the sun do not constitute time, but are merely the device which we use to mark it.
posted by Richiemagoo on 8-18-2007 at 11:52 am
Plus, he loved Graham Crackers.
posted by BAFox on 8-18-2007 at 7:19 pm
Note that Einstein did NOT say it was not possible to travel at the speed of light or faster.
After all, there are some elementary particles that he knew the theory of that travel only faster, never slower.
And light itself does travel at the speed of light.
What he said was that if se tried to accelerate something to travel to light speed - a physical object like a spaceship - it would take infinite energy, and the object would aquire infinite mass…. It would also be infinitely thin. It could also approach lightspeed, but never reach it… At least not in our universe.
If we are going to quote Eisntein’s ideas, let us at least get them right.
I think he deserves that much.
As for your warp drive spaceship, Eisntein was talking about the laws of physics as they fit the facts and technology, and knowledge and understanding them available.
He did not say that no one could ever do it under a different set of rules and assumptions. And he also noted that the entire thing was conditional on lightspeed being a constant, and gravity being a constant. There were several other constants and other such, but it has been years since I took a physics class.
So if someone does make a packet of photons tunnel through the space-time faster than light, you have not “made Einstein wrong, or stupid, or invalid”… You have merely set-up what he would have called a “special circumstance” that fits the rules of the event. But a packet of photons tunelling through the universe is a far cry from invalidating Einstein or the”Special Theory of Relativity”.
Let us compare apples to apples, and oranges to orangs. I think Einstein would want us to. No?
posted by Pierre M Laberge on 8-19-2007 at 5:08 pm
“Oranges to orangs”? If you say so.
posted by Pointy-Hatted Geek on 8-20-2007 at 4:31 pm