Blue Alien Network | The Hive

The starship Enterprise routinely flies faster than light, but of course, nothing really goes that fast. Well, almost nothing. Physicists have been concocting light pulses that do travel faster than c (the speed of light in a vacuum) for almost two decades, although none of the experiments could be used to send information that fast, according to most physicists. The latest demonstration, described in the 22 May PRL, may be the most dramatic, as it dispenses with some of the complexities of most other experiments: The light pulses travel through free space–not a highly absorbing material–and their superluminal (faster than light) feat covers a distance of 30 wavelengths, much farther than in any previous work.

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Howstuffworks

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.

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