Hi Jinx,

I only had time to skim the site, but it looks to me as though he is just
re-hashing the already well known ability of light to travel with a phase
velocity much higher than the speed of light(c). However, this does not
mean that you can communicate with a time delay less than distance/c
because communication requires that you send something other than an
unmodulated wave, and then what really matters is the energy velocity (or
the group velocity in most practical situations).

I find the page (and his paper on the subject, the one you can get to by
the link at the bottom of the page) uses somewhat ambiguous language and
examples. I'd like to see a clear diagram of what his setup is like (not a
photograph, but a block diagram) and exactly what he is measuring. It is
easy to demonstrate a wave traveling faster than the speed of light, but it
matters what your definition of speed is. You have to choose some point on
the wave to consider as the point that you will track as you measure the
speed, and this is not well defined for such dispersive situations as he is
using (i.e., for a pulse, the pulse shape you get out of the system will be
highly distorted from the one going in, so how do you tell which point on
the output corresponds to the one you chose on the input?)

He also claims that there are some deep implications of quantum mechanics
here because classical theory assumes that a detector can work with an
arbitrarily small amount of energy, but in the short time I had to skim it,
I didn't understand what he was claiming were the consequences of this.

It seems to me that his claim that an evanescent wave "spends no time in
the gap" because there is no variation in the spatial distribution over
time to be silly. You can say the same thing about a standing wave. The
evanescent solution only happens for the steady-state case, pulses do not
propagate instantly across an air gap in a prism (or down an undersized
waveguide).

Sean

At 11:29 AM 11/6/01 +1300, you wrote:
> > However, the speed of light IS absolute, measured in all reference frames.
>
>Comments on this ?
>
>http://www.compu-web.com/ftl.htm
>
>"Speeds measured on this device exceeded 9x the speed of light,
>within the frame of reference of this tunnel"
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
>ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.

----------------------------------------------------
Sign Up for NetZero Platinum Today
Only $9.95 per month!
http://my.netzero.net/s/signup?r=platinum&refcd=PT97

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.