Light Exceeds Its Own Speed Limit, or Does It?
By JAMES GLANZ
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The speed at which light travels through a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per
second, is enshrined in physics lore as a universal speed limit. Nothing
can travel faster than that speed, according freshman textbooks and conversation
at sophisticated wine bars; Einstein's theory of relativity would crumble,
theoretical physics would fall into disarray, if anything could.
Two new experiments have demonstrated how wrong that comfortable wisdom
is. Einstein's theory survives, physicists say, but the results of the experiments
are so mind-bending and weird that the easily unnerved are advised--in all
seriousness--not to read beyond this point.
In the most striking of the new experiments a pulse of light that enters
a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas is pushed
to speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light. That is so fast that,
under these peculiar circumstances, the main part of the pulse exits the
far side of the chamber even before it enters at the near side.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/053000sci-physics-light.html
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