![]() How Fast Is the Speed of Light in Air and Water? Thus, after light has traveled twice a given distance, the intensity drops by a factor of four. However, the intensity of light (and other electromagnetic radiation) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance traveled. This well-established scientific fact is not a product of the Atomic Age or even the Renaissance, but was originally promoted by the ancient Greek scholar, Euclid, somewhere around 350 BC in his landmark treatise Optica. Light traveling in a uniform substance, or medium, propagates in a straight line at a relatively constant speed, unless it is refracted, reflected, diffracted, or perturbed in some other manner. Not truly a constant, but rather the maximum speed in a vacuum, the speed of light in km, which is almost 300,000 kilometers per second, can be manipulated by changing media or with quantum interference. "But if the results are true, then a lot of the things we don't think of as possible suddenly become open to discussion again," Gallagher said.The speed of light, which scientists have thoroughly examined, is now expressed as a constant value denoted in equations by the symbol c. According to Hugh Gallagher, a particle physicist at Tufts University who works on the MINOS neutrino experiment, the CERN result will have to be replicated many times over before he and his colleagues abandon the tenets of special relativity. And just as a plane passing through the sound barrier emits a sonic boom, a superluminal craft passing through light speed would emit a flash of light."Īgain, no one is saying for certain that these scenarios are real. You would not see the neutrino plane until after it has gone past - and then only if it contained something that reflected or emitted light. Any light it emitted would be trailing behind in its wake. Similarly, he said, "If something were traveling faster than the speed of light, such as an airplane made of neutrinos, you wouldn't see it until after it had gone past you. What is the smallest particle in the universe? (What about the largest?) When the sound does finally hit you, it's in the form of a sonic boom - a shock wave that builds up as sound from the aircraft gets bunched together behind it. Because these jets travel faster than the speed of sound, you see them before you hear them. ![]() What if you were standing still in a speed-limitless universe? What would you see then?Īccording to Ibison, the situation is analogous to standing on the ground as a supersonic jet passes overhead. As the stream of transmissions receded behind you, they would run backward at whatever your excess speed is over and above their speed - the speed of light. "If you got on a neutrino spacecraft and travelled out to space at neutrino speed, you'd catch up with the TV broadcasts and overtake them, and you would start to see the video of the news running backwards," Ibison said. TV broadcasts playing the day's news are also emanating into space, and those are traveling at light speed. Imagine riding on a spacecraft made of faster-than-light neutrinos rocketing away from Earth. The concepts of cause and effect - of time flowing in one direction - also shatter in a superluminal world. ![]()
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