Faster Than Light?

Physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz have been researching a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, where particles apparently go through a barrier they theoretically shouldn't be able to pass.

In their experiment, which was reported in the latest edition of New Scientist, Nimtz and Stahlhofen fired microwaves through glass prisms separated by various distances ranging from a couple of centimeters up to one meter. When the microwaves were reflected through the prisms, most of the signal was reflected from the first prism, but a few microwaves "tunneled" through the gap to the second prism.

The physicists discovered that both the reflected and the tunneling signals arrived at their relative detectors at the same time, even though the tunneling particles had to travel a longer distance. Nimtz and Stahlhofen concluded that the tunneling particles had crossed the space between the two prisms "instantaneously" and therefore traveled faster than light.

Faster than light

But Einstein's Special Theory of Relatively, one of the basic premises of physics, states that matter or information cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (300,000 kps or 186,000 mps).

Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "This is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

However, it seems the question of whether the research debunks Einstein's theory is a matter of interpretation.

Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, Canada, is quoted by New Scientist as using the analogy of a train with 20 carriages traveling between two cities. The train leaves behind a carriage at every stop in between, to finish up with only two carriages at its destination.

If the measurement starts when the center of the train leaves the first station and stops when the center of the train arrives at the last station, then it will seem that the train has sped up. But in reality, it is only the center of the train that has moved, not that the train has moved faster.