Scientist Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster than Light

It’s been a long time dream of fanboys like myself to travel faster than the speed of light, because once you’re able to do that hopping around the the galaxy becomes easy (ala Star Trek or Star Wars). Shown above on the left is a table top polarization synchrotron which allows radio signals to travel faster than the speed of light. I don’t expect interstellar travel to become a reality any time soon, but this is a pretty neat start:

LANL scientist makes radio waves travel faster than light

“Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn’t be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist’s theories about light into a pretzel. Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that’s not really the case, Singleton said.

Einstein predicted that particles and information can’t travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That’s a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. 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, Singleton said.”

…by the way a real world use for this might be cell phones that can talk directly to satellites or as a new type of chemotherapy aimed directly at a tumor.

Found via noted curmudgeon John C. Dvorak.