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Thursday, May 23, 2013
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Comments
FTL communtication is nothing new by: Anonymous on 7/1/2009
I'm just a communications engineer, but I do know that Anton Zeilinger and his team achieved FTL communication in 2005. Granted, now it's just for cryptography, but it surely sounds more promising then this piece of garbage, since I have yet to see it published in a peer reviewed journal.

Why would bsn sink so low to even give this "old" news a second thought ?
@Theo, just one point by: Gipsel on 7/1/2009
"Every time ppl start talking about sub-atom transistors, I politely remind myself that we still can't see atoms, but their traces [am I wrong? ;-) ]."

Of course one can see individual atoms (for quite a while now) with some technical effort. Just look to the pictures of the next generation transistors you had in an article here. Never wondered what that regular structure one sees in the silicon actually is? ;)

But generally there is some truth to your point of view. Most laws of physics normally only apply in a certain regime or for certain prerequisites. So sometimes it will help to look at a problem in a completely new way.
But that is now possible to produce 28nm transistors with 193nm lithography (which was claimed to be impossibble some years ago by some shortsighted guys not taking all prerequisites into account) does not involve the breaking of any rules. It just uses a set of clever tricks to push the laws close to its limits. But the limits are still there!
RE: quite some stuff mixed up by: Theo Valich on 6/30/2009
Frankly, given that semiconductor industry is pretty much everywhere - it can help. If we are getting ready to deploy SOI wafers on delivering optical lasers because the chips dropped below the speed of light.
While maybe not in semiconductor industry with the names such as AMD and Intel, there are $$$$-heavy industries that need those... for instance, PowerCore audio accelerators [FireWire Rack systems with 4-8 processors with SRAM memory etc.]... there are applications that could well use this kind of modulation...

When it comes to physic part, you might call me crazy - but I do not believe that the rules and laws we set are written in stone. To me, it was incredible watching an astro-physics debate is the universe shrinking or expanding, when IT industry well proved what's possible and what's not possible, and everytime that "not possible" was modified with "not yet possible". Every time ppl start talking about sub-atom transistors, I politely remind myself that we still can't see atoms, but their traces [am I wrong? ;-) ].

Elementary laws of physics are there, but we know physics on on planet Earth and already explored universe. Thus, my take is that we still don't know sh*t. We know the basics and expanded basics... but hey, a lot of things should be impossible. And yet, a lot of this barriers break over time.

Bottom line is - we don't know what's possible and what's not possible [yet]. That's why we, non-phD folk rely on people such as yourself to push the boundaries and either re-iterate those laws or... show that there are ways to "expand" them. True, particle did not travel faster than the speed of light. But a radio wave was accelerated. And in the end, if that ends up having a commercial use, it doesn't matter was it the needle or a haystack. It can/will change the world.

Or so we hope.

Ed.
quite some stuff mixed up by: Gipsel on 6/30/2009
Actually, Einstein claimed that no information can travel faster then the speed of light in vacuum. And that is still very true.

There are some measurements on superluminal (i.e. faster than lightspeed) tunneling with microwaves. While it works somehow, you still don't get information through the tunneling barrier faster than without it.

One have to distinguish some different speeds to understand the whole thing. There is the so called phase velocity, the speed a maximum of a waves oscillation moves. This can be easily above the so called group velocity (the speed a modulation of the wave intensity and therefore the information travels) and even above the speed of light, but it is completely meaningless for transferring some data.
If one looks a bit more careful, even the group velocity can be above the vacuum lightspeed in some rare cases, but the real maximum for data transfer is actually the so called front velocity (in most cases equaling the group velocity) which is in all cases smaller than the speed of light in vacuum.

Byt the way, the analogy drawn to a sonic boom in that linked article is plain wrong. In fact, that analogy exists and is well known as the Tcherenkov effect. It is caused by a (charged) particle which moves through a material with a speed higher than the phase velocity of light in that material, i.e. the speed of light divided by the refractive index. The material can be even air. There are some Tcherenkov telescopes which look for these flashes of Tcherenkov light in our atmosphere (emitted in a cone like the Mach cone in case of a sonic boom) to detect gamma ray bursts for instance. Another possibility is a neutrino "telescope" with a huge water tank or just using the ice from a glacier.

If I look on his antenna and the description of it, it appears to be some kind of a phased array antenna, maybe better a phased line antenna (as it is only one dimensional). One can control the direction in which the wave gets emitted, which leads to a higher signal, if it is directed to the receiver. This can be done without moving a parabola, which makes it interesting for a lot of applications, but this is well known stuff. That article only makes some kind of a mystery out of how he modulates the phases along the antenna. As I understand it, he "sweeps" the amplitudes above lightspeed along that (slightly bended) antenna which leads to a combination of the effects of a phased array antenna and the directed emission of some kind of Tcherenkov light (can be radio frequency, too). That may lead to a better focussing of the emitter to the receiver than with a normal emitter.
That may help with the signal strength for long distance transmissions, but the emitted waves never travel faster than the speed of light.

And that it may help the semiconductor industry is very far fetched. After all one needs much shorter wavelengths there, which are not as easy to manipulate and the better focussing won't help, as we won't see chips with more than just a few square centimeters ;)

Sorry, I'm a physicist ;)
by: Anonymous on 6/30/2009
This is from January, 2008. And the waves do not travel faster than light: http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/1663.article/d/200801/id/12337
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