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Date: | Thu, 20 Jul 2000 14:09:00 -0700 |
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You guys have got it all wrong. My eight, then five year old daughter
explained to me that Dark travels twice as fast as light, which explains why
it's there before you turn the light on and, why there's so much of it.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Scott [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 2:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Faster Than Light?
Dennis writes:
> Another possible theory that has been tossed out is a "spooky at a
> distance" action.
Sorry, but "Spooky action at a distance" (Einstein's description) is a well
established fact. See any of the recent popular articles on Quantum
Cryptography for an overview.
I don't believe however that this has anything to do with the recent "faster
than light" nonsense.
The best explanation I've heard for the "faster than light" issue is that if
you imagine you're at the beach, and two waves arrive at the shore from
slightly different directions, then the point at which the two waves
intersect will travel along faster than either of the waves themselves.
You can see the same thing if you take two sheets of paper stacked on top of
each other, tilt one by 15 degrees or so, and then slide that sheet left and
right while watching as the edge of the top sheet passes the edge of the
bottom sheet. The "point" at which the two edges intersect moves up and
down much faster than the sheets of paper are moving relative to each other.
In the "faster than light" experiment this is the kind of thing that's
happening. While there is a "thing" you can describe (the intersection of
two waves) that "moves" faster than the speed of light, clearly there is no
single physical particle that's moving this fast and there's no way to use
this to communicate information etc. It's really more of an illusion than
anything real.
G.
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