Faster than light Motzart!

Catch up World! Mozart Has Been Traveling Faster Than Light for A Decade

For almost a century, Einstein's assertion that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, was taken as the great speed limit in the sky. What almost no one realizes is that Einstein was proved wrong more than a decade ago through the work a very stubborn professor with the help of a dash of Mozart.

The quantum world is a funny place. One of its curious properties is that objects are not exactly where there are. A least not as we think of it. In the case of an electron or a photon of energy, location is actually a function of probability. An electron is more likely here than there, but it's never exactly anywhere.

A strange coincidence of this is that an energetic particle, photon or electron, that approaches a barrier may, if the barrier is thin enough, suddenly, as if a mathematician picked it up and put it there, appear on the other side of the object. It's not likely but it's possible. This is called quantum tunneling. While no one knows exactly how this is possible is it a well known event. Tunneling electron microscopes use this effect every day.

In 1995, Dr Gunter Nimtz, of the University of Koblenz got curious about the speed of quantum tunneling and built an experiment that worked like this; He set a microwave generator on one end of his work bench and a sensor on the other. He interfered with some of the photons generated but not others. The interfered with photons were forced to quantum tunnel if they were to reach the sensor. His result? The tunneling photons arrived well before the others, suggesting that quantum tunneling occurs at more than four times the speed of light.

This analogy is not exactly right but think about it this way; You have a round float in the middle of a swimming pool. A wave, approaching the float moves uniformly. When the edge of the wave touches the edge of the float, however, the energy of the wave is transmitted to the far edge of the float where it moves on as a smaller ripple ahead of the larger ripple. If this is happening at the speed of light, you would now have a wave, traveling at the speed of light well ahead of a wave that left the source at the same time.

While no one knows why Nimtz' photons act this way, probably not by pushing the barrier like the float, the effect is the same. Some data traveling at light speed is arriving well before others.

Like all brilliant insights, Nimtz's work has caused a whirlwind of controversy even from those who have successfully duplicated the findings. One American group even argued that, while the phenomenon was real, it only produced junk and could never be used to transmit data. Nimitz' answer was simple and elegant. He played Mozart's 40th symphony through his machine. When it came out the other side after having traveled four times the speed of light he said:

"Maybe in America Mozart is not information but in Germany he has much information."

Go Nimtz. Go Mozart!