A light pulse came out of a caesium chamber 62 nanoseconds before entering it... I heard this on the radio just when I was about to have a shower. I stared at the mirror, and I was already naked and wet. I wondered if this had to do with this amazing discovery or with the terrible hangover I had this morning.
Are we starting to enter a world full of FTL paradoxes?
The most popular FTL paradox is the grandfather paradox: an astronaut leaves Earth in a spaceship than can travel faster than light (if such thing ever exists, we’re not massless photons, you know), and when he returns, he finds that he has travelled back in time, and he is living in a time where his grandparents are yet to give birth to his father (or mother). So he could kill them and enter the realm of FTL paradoxes…
This astonishingly finding was announced yesterday in the Nature magazine by Lijun J. Wang and his team from the NEC Research Institute at Pricenton (New Jersey). Wang warns that Einstein’s special relativity theory and the principle of causality aren’t being infringed:
“you can make light pulses travel faster than c. This is a special property of light, which is different from a known object like a brick, as light is a wave without mass”.
According to his reasoning, faster than light pulses are the result of the classical mechanisms of
interference, caused by the wavy nature of light, and they don’t allow any kind of
FTL information transmission.
So...what happened this morning was caused by the hangover, uff!!