Hold off on the Funeral for Special Relativity
Harvard physicist Luboš Motl throws some cold water on recent claims to have broken the speed of light. He argues:
Two years ago or so, Robert Helling
explained what these experiments are all about. As far as I can say,
there is nothing new about Nimtz's findings or observations and not
much interesting about them either. He's been doing the very same
things for decades.He builds a setup in which the maximum
of a wave moves faster than light (although you need amplifiers to find
where the maximum is at the end). That's of course possible. In fact,
it's very easy. You can make such things with normal classical
electromagnetic waves as long as you have a layer of material where
they exponentially drop. In analogy with Schrödinger's equation, you
may realize that tunneling can be very fast.However,
microscopically, no signal or information is moving superluminally and
nothing is violated about special relativity whatsoever because all
these waves perfectly satisfy Maxwell's equations where the speed of
light is safely bounded. Nimtz must know that, I think, so his behavior
seems dishonest to me.
