Bandwidth's Next Step

Prove how smart you techs actually are..............I am ready to fly on the net..........Bring it on dogg..............

heh. the only thing that's flying right now is that article. right over my head.

I have studied this, and let me assure everyone that the known laws of quantum mechanics do NOT allow communication faster than the speed of light.

The most charitable thing I can say about the Bell telegraph article is that it is so over-simplified that it conveys no information at all. The Bell telegraph is a subtle device that physicists have studied for decades, and the correct interpretation of the Bell telegraph is still a subject of debate. But one thing it does NOT do is accept data at one end and spit out the data at the other end; it isn't really a "telegraph" as most people understand the term.

In other words, a Bell telegraph by itself can't transmit any data. To use it as part of a data transmission system, you have to send additional, classical (non-quantum) messages. And those messages, alas, are limited to the speed of light.

I have read scientific papers claiming that there might be some way to use quantum mechanics to communicate faster than light. But just like 19th-century proposals for perpetual motion machines, there is always a mistake.

Well then, it should keep them busy for the next few years then. Hopefully they are dedicated, and won't stop until the have found a cure.
[text was edited by author 2002-08-19 14:47:26]

Yeah, it's kinda hard to understand unless you are neck-deep into the actual discovery, I suppose.
However, it sounds interesting, but seems too immature to make a real intellectual theory out of it.
What I do know about the Theory of Relativity, as the article also points out, is that this would not be possible.

That’s a shame. I was looking forward to the spare time it would free up that I now spent waiting for electricity AT the speed of light.

Will it make my quake III ping times better?

It is actually possible to go faster than the speed of light. And it has been physically proven, no loger is it theory but fact... read on:

Breaking the Light Speed Limit
››Tell a friend about this news item!
Once thought to be unbreakable, the speed of light as set by the laws of physics has been exceeded in two recent experiments, according to a New York Times news report. The speed of light in a vacuum, or empty space, is 186,000 miles per second. Exceeding this speed jeopardizes the entire theory of relativity, which rests on the idea that light speed is the universal limit to how fast anything can travel.

Scientists have found ways to break that speed limit. In one experiment performed by researchers at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., a pulse of light was sent through a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas and was pushed to travel at speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light. The light travels so fast that the main part of the light pulse exits the chamber even before it enters. Theoretically, this means that you could see a moment in time before it actually takes place.

Researchers at the NEC declined to comment on the experiment while it is under review by Nature, a weekly peer-reviewed science journal. However, Kazuko Anderson, a spokesperson with the NEC in New York, confirmed the accuracy of the New York Times report.

In a second superluminal study, published in the May 22 issue of Physical Review Letters, scientists at the Italian National Research Council of Florence shone light beams at a curved mirror. The mirror then shot the beams back at the instrument that measured the rays' speeds. The beam coming from the center of the mirror was measured at 5 percent to 7 percent faster than light speed. The authors said this effect only works over relatively short distances, such as the one meter used by the Italian researchers.

Exceeding the speed of light may have future implications for space travel and computer chips, but for now scientists are uncertain about the practical use of this discovery. Neither experiment was able to use a light beam to carry any information or prove that an object of any weight would be able to travel beyond light speed.

»www.howstuffworks.com/ne ··· tem6.htm

happy days are soon upon us.

But where is it now?

Another discovery was made recently that suggests light traveled faster just after the big bang.

said by SMraz:

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It is actually possible to go faster than the speed of light. And it has been physically proven, no loger is it theory but fact... read on:

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Fact Schmact... HowStuffworks quoted a New York Times article that has been "clarified" which in NYT terms means "bunk". The speed of light is fixed as we know the laws of physics. period. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know very well that e does in fact equal mc^2. And for that, c must be constant. It is entirely possible that quantum mechanics will lead us to a new discovery of energy or matter or (insert cool thing here) that we can't possibly imagine. Many people are perplexed at how 2 particles at any distance can change spin characteristics at the same time. There will be an answer some day, then, next thing you know..BEAM ME UP SCOTTY!!!

We're closer to this than many think. In the May 2002 issue of Discover magazine they covered Quantum Cryptography. Here's the neat quote:

quote:

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the difficulty lies in building a communications network that can handle the delicate process of quantum encryption. Hughes and his colleagues are concentrating on a "free space" system that sends the photons through open air, with the ultimate goal of bouncing laser pulses off a satellite—a tough technical challenge—to transmit an encrypted message anywhere in the world. Air molecules can disrupt the photons, but in October of last year, the Los Alamos team cleanly transmitted digital bits more than six miles, a record.

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Purty darn close, no?

Dogg

Links? ???

Here is the link.

»dsc.discovery.com/news/a ··· ics.html

I also thought that objects moved faster than the speed of light as they are pulled into black holes... I thought this was one of the only instances of actual materials (ie not just light) moving faster than the speed of light. I don't know how far away objects are when they accelerate greater than the speed of light... Any astrophysics nerds in here to verify??? Does this correlate to the theory of relativity in the sense that after they accelerate that fast they're mass increases dramatically, which explains why black holes have so much mass and are so dense???

but the theory holds true (ie that objects move faster than the speed of light) if you think about light not being able to escape (hence "black hole")...

but as far as a telecommunication device moving data faster than the speed of light..... hey, I'm game... I'd pay more than the $50 a month, that I pay for cable, to get some of that stuff!!!!

Interesting...thanks.
Looks like we must "unlearn what we have learned", to quote a Jedi Master........

I thought that the article read that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant....

The experiment "tipped the scales" of sorts in favor of speeding up the light... but this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the real world.

The fact that the light was there "before it started" is additional proof....

Let's just hope they can apply this duck shoot experiment to more things...

Using quantum physics to encrypt data that is transmitted is totally different than what the article is talking about. The article talks about quantum spin of particles, but nothing actually moves between the source and destination, like a laster with photons.

To quote me, I said 'Purty Darn Close'. I know it's not a Bell Telegraph by any means, but being able to send data in a quantum state and (the big part IMHO) RECEIVE it is a huge step in the right direction. I assume most people here are more interested in Broadband rather than the current state of quantum technology, so I figured a related link would demonstrate that we're a lot closer to obtaining this nifty stuff than most people think.

Dogg

quote:

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I also thought that objects moved faster than the speed of light as they are pulled into black holes

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No, actually it takes an infinte amount of time IIRC. Gravity bends time as well as space, and thus the stronger the gravity, the slower the time. Perhaps from our perspective it's faster than light, but relative to the black hole it's not.

Dogg

So now we know OOL's little secret for speed...

Yeah this is great that we can do this stuff, but until it benefits me, the end user, I will simply yawn and turn the page. It does not seem that long ago that I read about 10 gigabit lines, and here I am still stuck with 2 meg down and 384 up. Yeah I realize there are people still stuck on 56K, but in comparison to what we are capable of, my speeds are nothing to brag about. I say so far OOL is the only company more interested in higher speeds than profits.

The moment all this new technology is used to give me at least 10 meg down and 1 meg up is the day I get excited.

Would my ping times be negative? hehe

You guys seem to be arguing about whether or not something can travel faster than light. The opponents are citing the Theory of Relativity. It is really important to note that the Theory does NOT say an object can not travel faster than the speed of light. It states that an object can not be ACCELERATED to or beyond the speed of light because it would take infinite energy (from mass increase).

For example, a tachyon (while still theoretical) would always be traveling faster than light, and energy would have to be applied to slow it. These theoretical particles don't violate the Theory. Even more interesting, a the rest mass of the neutrino has been calculated several times to be imaginary, meaning that tachyons may very well exist.

A Bell Telegraph may very well transmit faster than light without violating the Theory of Relativity. After all, we have no clue about how an entangled particle changes spin. It may just be tachyonic and we don't understand it yet.

"Da hell? I just got a ping of -14 and fraged a guy before I even saw him..."

Someone will mess up the broadband electrons
before we get any faster...

Something powers UFO's

The solution is to alter the gravitational constant.

So... I could Frag my enemy before I even saw him or fired? That'd be kinda cool.

As long as only I could do it.

said by KrK:

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So... I could Frag my enemy before I even saw him or fired? That'd be kinda cool.

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Kinda like the movie Minority Report, right? It must be true if it is in the media or Hollywood puts it up in lights