[Kosh]

Is this for real?

A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light. Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but phenomena like radio waves are a different story, said John Singleton, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists.

[Polpolion]

  It's all technobabble to me.

[watsisname]

I keep failing to see exactly where this goes from sending informationless pulses/waves FTL to where it can become useful for communication.  That the whole article is filled with poorly explained technobabble doesn't really help. 

I'll just wait for Herra to save the day. 

[Polpolion]

I keep failing to see exactly where this goes from sending informationless pulses/waves FTL to where it can become useful for communication.

Morse code? Or heck you can just transmit binary. One length burst for zero, and another for one. The receiver would interpret the results. And if it can make radio waves travel faster than light, then it can do whatever a radio can faster than the speed of light.

[redsniper]

Ansibles!

[watsisname]

What I see:

The device consists of a 2 meter-long gently curving arc of alumina (a dielectric material), with a series of electrodes fitted at regular intervals along its length.  Applying a sinusoidal HURRDURR ... can make the wave travel FTL.  However no physical quantity of charge travels faster than light speed.
Then, a bunch of possible practical uses.

Yet there's no real explanation whatsoever as to how exactly it works, just how they achieved it, which went a bit over my head anyway.

And I don't really understand the significance of having no net charge travelling FTL.  Surely it's impossible to do such but what's the difference between sending charge and sending a wave in this context?  Or sending something that contains information and thus would break causality (assuming the nature of the universe is causal, which I've read an article recently which says that may not actually be the case).  Anyway, I dun' get it. 

[General Battuta]

I keep failing to see exactly where this goes from sending informationless pulses/waves FTL to where it can become useful for communication.

Morse code? Or heck you can just transmit binary. One length burst for zero, and another for one. The receiver would interpret the results. And if it can make radio waves travel faster than light, then it can do whatever a radio can faster than the speed of light.

It can't, though.

[Rian]

I suspect that this is a case of the journalist not fully understanding what's going on, because radio waves are light.

The actual phenomenon sounds like it might be related to this, which is basic wave mechanics stuff:

Unfortunately we frequently read in the newspapers about how someone has succeeded in transmitting a wave with a group velocity exceeding c, and we are asked to regard this as an astounding discovery, overturning the principles of relativity, etc. The problem with these stories is that the group velocity corresponds to the actual signal velocity only under conditions of normal dispersion, or, more generally, under conditions when the group velocity is less than the phase velocity. In other circumstances, the group velocity does not necessarily represent the actual propagation speed of any information or energy. For example, in a regime of anomalous dispersion, which means the refractive index decreases with increasing wave number, the preceding formula shows that what we called the group velocity exceeds what we called the phase velocity. In such circumstances the group velocity no longer represents the speed at which information or energy propagates.

[Maniax]

Speaking of ansibles, what about this as a possibility for FTL communication?

A new study found that this eerie quantum link can apply even to situations that resemble the larger, everyday world. Scientists entangled two pairs of vibrating particles separated in space, so that when one pair was forced to change its movement, the other pair did as well.

"We've entangled something that has never been entangled before, and it's the kind of physical, oscillating system you see in the classical world, just much smaller," said John Jost, a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Jost and team describe their findings in the June 4 issue of the journal Nature.

Previous experiments have entangled the internal properties of particles, such as spin states, but this is the first time scientists have entangled the particles' pattern of motion.

...

To achieve this feat of entanglement, Jost and colleagues set up two pairs of ions (atoms with one electron removed, so that they have a positive charge). Each pair included one beryllium and one magnesium ion, vibrating back and forth toward and away from each other as if they were connected by an invisible spring.

Using electric fields and lasers, the researchers herded the ions into separate pairs and then entangled their motion. Then they separated the pairs by 240 micrometers (millionths of a meter), which is actually quite a span for an atom. Even at this distance, when the researchers changed the motion of one pair — stopped or started the vibrations — the other responded immediately, stopping or starting in kind.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090603-maco-entanglement.html

Sure, the correspondence of the ions was only observed at a distance of 240 micrometers, not exactly useful for long distance communication.  But does this mean that all we need to do is increase that range, and boom, we have FTL email?

[Bob-san]

Speaking of ansibles, what about this as a possibility for FTL communication?

A new study found that this eerie quantum link can apply even to situations that resemble the larger, everyday world. Scientists entangled two pairs of vibrating particles separated in space, so that when one pair was forced to change its movement, the other pair did as well.

"We've entangled something that has never been entangled before, and it's the kind of physical, oscillating system you see in the classical world, just much smaller," said John Jost, a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Jost and team describe their findings in the June 4 issue of the journal Nature.

Previous experiments have entangled the internal properties of particles, such as spin states, but this is the first time scientists have entangled the particles' pattern of motion.

...

To achieve this feat of entanglement, Jost and colleagues set up two pairs of ions (atoms with one electron removed, so that they have a positive charge). Each pair included one beryllium and one magnesium ion, vibrating back and forth toward and away from each other as if they were connected by an invisible spring.

Using electric fields and lasers, the researchers herded the ions into separate pairs and then entangled their motion. Then they separated the pairs by 240 micrometers (millionths of a meter), which is actually quite a span for an atom. Even at this distance, when the researchers changed the motion of one pair — stopped or started the vibrations — the other responded immediately, stopping or starting in kind.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090603-maco-entanglement.html

Sure, the correspondence of the ions was only observed at a distance of 240 micrometers, not exactly useful for long distance communication.  But does this mean that all we need to do is increase that range, and boom, we have FTL email?

'
This FTL junk is basically useless on-planet, but proving something in a lab is always the first step to making it a reality. What I'm afraid of is how large and what the power requirement is for a scaled up system like this.

[General Battuta]

Doesn't matter. You can't pass information via entanglement.

[Polpolion]

I keep failing to see exactly where this goes from sending informationless pulses/waves FTL to where it can become useful for communication.

Morse code? Or heck you can just transmit binary. One length burst for zero, and another for one. The receiver would interpret the results. And if it can make radio waves travel faster than light, then it can do whatever a radio can faster than the speed of light.

It can't, though.

A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light.

  This is a pretty retarded article if the only sentence that's not full of technobabble is a blatant lie.

[General Battuta]

Go read Rian's post.

Your mistake was in thinking that 'if it can make radio waves go faster than light, then it can do whatever a radio can faster than light'. This isn't true, because it doesn't involve a precise enough definition of what it means for a wave to exceed lightspeed.

Information can't be passed FTL.

That said, it's good to see you around, thesizzler. Where've you been?

[ssmit132]

He must have been traveling at the speed of light himself and time-traveled into the future.

I know that near speed of light travel causes time to slow rather than speed up.

[Aardwolf]

This is stupid.

The phenomenon being described sounds like quantum tunneling, in which a particle may arrive somewhere faster than it would take to get there traveling at the speed of light. This is an observed phenomenon.

Getting the particles to arrive at the destination faster than light could and in the correct order however is, as far as we know, impossible. And I doubt this article addresses the "in the correct order" bit.

Too bad it's so full of technobabble that even I can't read it.

Edit: nevermind, I know what this is. The idiot "inventor" has observed that you can make the peaks/troughs of a wave move faster than the propagation speed. Problem being, that only applies once the wave is at the destination. I'll make a gif animation in a second.

Edit III: Scratch Edit 2, here's Wikipedia on the subject:

[General Battuta]

Aardwolf, read the damn thread before posting!

[Bobboau]

yeah, none of you people read the article, because it describes perfictly how he did it

"Singleton said the polarization synchrotron basically abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light."

he just ***** slapped that radio wave and told it to get its ass back in the kitchen or he'd do it again. and bam, faster than the speed of light it's there.

[Rian]

 ^ Bahahahahaha. Thread won.

[Aardwolf]

Aardwolf, read the damn thread before posting!

...I did

[General Battuta]

Go read Rian's post. It says what you said.

I pimp my MIT physics friend out.