Quote:
Originally posted by mick
Electrical pulses break light speed record
22 January 2002
Pulses that travel faster than light have been sent over a significant distance for the first time. Alain Haché and Louis Poirier of the University of Moncton in Canada transmitted the pulses through a 120-metre cable made from a coaxial 'photonic crystal'. The achievement raises hopes that data could travel through electronic communications systems at almost the speed of light (A Haché and L Poirier 2002 Appl. Phys. Lett. 80 518).
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Interesting. Is this from Woody's link? I still can't get it to work but this must refer to so-called "group velocity" which is well known and does not violate the law that nothing travels faster than light in a vacuum. It's also kinda useless, since what is travelling "faster than light" cannot really be used to transmit signals, in fact what causes this is actually avoided in practice beacause it distorts the original signal. I'm not sure why they say it raises hopes of speeding trasmisson, we can already do that with fiber optics.