The refractive index of a medium is the speed of light in a vacuum divided by the speed of light in the medium. The difference is negligible through air, but light can be slowed down considerably through other media, including glass, which makes up the core of most fiber optic cabling. Light, when moving through just about any medium, is slower than the universal constant we know as the speed of light. Light through fiber optic is not as fast as light through a vacuum. The "in a vacuum" reference on the previous page regarding the speed of light is important. Rather than using copper to conduct data in the form of electrical signals, fiber optic cable moves data as pulses of light.
#Particle traveling faster than light tv
The two most common types of copper wire for long-distance information transfer are twisted pair (used first for telephony, and later for dial-up Internet and DSL), and coaxial cable (used for cable TV initially, then Internet and phone). Even when we send data via our cell phones over radio waves, which also travel at light speed, it ends up traversing the wired networks of the Internet at some point. Read on to find out about current data speeds and the potential for faster-than-light information.Ĭurrently, most of our data travels through either copper wire or fiber optic cable. Some scientists are working on doing the same for the purposes of much faster data transfer. Space travel is just one of the possible applications of reaching or exceeding the speed of light. The technology, if it ever exists, could also be used for going slower than light, but much faster than we can go now, which might be more practical. The math behind these theories is based on the laws of relativity, so theoretically it wouldn't be breaking the rules. Unfortunately, the negative energy would have to come from exotic matter that is difficult to come by, and we're currently only at the level of miniature lab experiments on warp drives. It was later refined to requiring a planet-sized amount and then again to needing an amount around the size of the Voyager 1 space probe.
This concept was originally modeled by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 as a theoretical possibility, but one that would require a universe-sized amount of negative energy to power the phenomenon. The idea is that space time could be contracted in front of a spaceship and expanded behind it, while the ship would remain stationary in a warp bubble that itself was moving faster than the speed of light. In fact, bending space-time is one theory of how superluminal – faster-than-light - speeds in space travel might be reached. Other researchers are trying to bend the rules rather than break them. So no rewriting of Einstein's theories turned out to be necessary. Finally, equipment issues, including a loose cable, were discovered as likely culprits, and the results were declared erroneous. Ideas as to either how these neutrinos could have actually broken the speed of light, or as to what errors could have caused the impossible results, abounded. In September 2011, physicists working on the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) created a frenzy in the scientific community when they announced that their experiments resulted in subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy and arriving around 60 nanoseconds earlier than a beam of light. Light, in a vacuum, travels at approximately 299,792 kilometers per second (186,282 miles per second). But in science, if you make a hard-and-fast rule, someone will try to disprove it, or at least find a loophole. Light speed is considered the universal speed limit of everything, and this is widely accepted by the scientific community. One of the tenets of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
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