Quantum-Tunneling Electrons Could Make Semiconductors Obsolete 276
Nerval's Lobster writes "The powerful, reliable combination of transistors and semiconductors in computer processors could give way to systems built on the way electrons misbehave, all of it contained in circuits that warp even the most basic rules of physics. Rather than relying on a predictable flow of electrons that appear to know whether they are particles or waves, the new approach depends on quantum tunneling, in which electrons given the right incentive can travel faster than light, appear to arrive at a new location before having left the old one, and pass straight through barriers that should be able to hold them back. Quantum tunneling is one of a series of quantum-mechanics-related techniques being developed as possible replacements for transistors embedded in semiconducting materials such as silicon. Unlike traditional transistors, circuits built by creating pathways for electrons to travel across a bed of nanotubes are not limited by any size restriction relevant to current manufacturing methods, require far less power than even the tiniest transistors, and do not give off heat or leak electricity as waste products, according to Yoke Khin Yap of Michigan Technological University, lead author of a paper describing the technique, which was published in the journal Advanced Materials last week."
gasp! (Score:5, Funny)
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You mean the 1950s are back? Tunnel diodes were supposed to rule the world back then too! How exciting!
Tunneling is an old friend. It's also used for erasing NOR Flash.
Story time (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was young kid, in the early 1960's, I visited a ham radio operator a bunch of times. Cool radios, etc. He taught me some key things about tubes, started a long slide into technology that still hasn't stopped. I asked him about transistors. He looked at me somewhat askance and said "yeah, "I heard about them things. Tubes, son. I know tubes." And went back to teaching me about tubes, and resonance, and etc. Outside of his place, I hooked into an NRI electronics course, and spent a summer sucking that down, while running to my older friend Tony to help me with the math. NRI was teaching tubes then too, but they had an excellent section on transistors, and so I grew comfortable with them just as they were becoming interesting and more widely used. Tubes, except for certain specific jobs, just aren't used much now as we all know, and I've always been grateful for my luck in terms of timing; a few years earlier, and I'd have been looking askance at transistors myself. But instead, I've been comfortable with semiconductors right up until they got too small for me to handle (surface mount, trembling hands, etc.) And I know tubes.
The idea that another revolution of similar importance may happen in my lifetime...
Damn. I just feel like one amazingly lucky fellow. :) Now, will I be able to grasp the tech if it makes it to market? That, as they say, remains to be seen. Getting older doesn't mean you're without a clue. It just means you no longer always know where you put them.
Re:Story time (Score:4, Funny)
Getting older doesn't mean you're without a clue. It just means you no longer always know where you put them.
You, sir, made my day.
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Getting older doesn't mean you're without a clue. It just means you no longer always know where you put them.
Unless you're a mathematician, since the old knowledge never gets outdated for you.
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If you've learned about bipolar transistors and MOSFET's, you've learned about tubes as well. FETs are very similar to tubes in their characteristic curves - both are considered voltage-driven devices. Bipolar transistors, on the other hand, are current-driven devices.
I'm glad to hear a ham helped you out - we're like that!
Re:Story time (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, tubes and fets share various characteristics, but there are a lot of things they don't share and I guarantee you that a good grounding (hah!) in fets of all kinds isn't sufficient to go off and do tube design beyond the very simplest applications. There have been some seriously weird tubes with no corresponding single-semiconductor solution; quite aside from the huge range of voltages involved, there are screen grids, directly heated cathodes, gas-filled regulators, CRTs (imagine depending on knowledge of a FET to make a CRT work, eh?), coupling issues, various kinds of noise peculiar to tubes, weird stuff like microphonics, just a whole host of interesting issues and devices. Plus, things you'd take as similar act quite differently, even starting just from a rectifier diode. And tubes glow in the dark. You're thinking orange, right? But an OA2 in normal operation is a beautiful, bright purple. And there are tubes that are green bar graphs, tubes that can display characters... :)
Yes, that ham made a huge difference for me, and I try to do the same - happy to wear the "Elmer" hat. Been an extra class for decades now. Also, lately, been working on a free software defined radio [fyngyrz.com] app, so in way, I'm getting right back to my roots.
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I think the most interesting part of this is that yes, we are not yet out of revolutions. Interesting times, while an ancient Chinese curse, is certainly more fun than living without these new innovations. Bring them on!
And I agree, getting older these days means you may have greater insight. The worst waste of time I see in programming is the "re-invention" cycle that occurs every 5-7 years with the latest new language or methodology. And after the newness wears off, the same old approaches are gravitate
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Because
1) No one's managed to get relativity and quantum effects to line up with each other yet.
2) Relativity doesn't ban traveling faster than light, it bans accelerating to the speed of light.
Re:Faster than light ?! (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Dirac did. And it led him to the prediction of antimatter. And all quantum field theories are relativistic quantum mechanics.
What hasn't yet been managed is to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. However that's irrelevant for the FTL tunneling question because the speed of light limit is a property of special relativity, which has completely and fruitfully been united with quantum mechanics a long time ago.
Relativity tells us that if we could travel faster than light, then we could also violate causality. So unless you are willing to give up causality, relativity indeed does ban travelling faster than light.
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Josephen called (Score:4, Interesting)
He wants his junction back
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect [wikipedia.org]
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It is not hard to be right about a lot of things, you just say all options. The hard thing is to get a good hit/miss ratio.
Now that's insightful!
Let me be the first to say it (Score:2)
We won't see this tech for at least 20 years before it get's applied to consumer products, if at all.
OTOH, it is exciting to see the kinds of research being done that will advance computing beyond our wildest dreams.
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We won't see this tech for at least 20 years before it get's applied to consumer products, if at all.
OTOH, it is exciting to see the kinds of research being done that will advance computing beyond our wildest dreams.
Who cares about consumer products. The transistor was invented in 1947 and was being used by the early 50's. Even for consumer products the first transistor radio was being sold by 1954. The IC was invented in 1958 and was being used by the early 60's.
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wrong. After Jack Kilby of TI invented IC, their first customer was the U.S. Air Force. After four years of working together TI and Air Force built IC based computer used in various defense projects including Minuteman missile.
Get it into your head, space/defense and integrated circuits and computers closely linked,
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Actually, quantum-tunnelling semiconductors are being developed as useful products right now.
One that I know of is a type of strain gauge which exhibits no mechanical hysteresis. Imagine conductive nanoparticles suspended in a stretchy insulator. The material is a semiconductor, and it conducts by quantum tunnelling. The more you stretch the material, the further apart the nanoparticles, and so the higher the electrical resistance.
Faster than light? (Score:2)
quantum tunneling, in which electrons given the right incentive can travel faster than light,
I know stuff can go faster than light, provided no information does, but I am not sure that happens in tunneling. Does it?
Re:Faster than light? (Score:4, Interesting)
It does. Tunneling is instantaneous. It may even be able to transfer information, but the jury is still out on that and classical quantum mechanics says it cannot. If it can, then it can transfer information without time delay, but only over short distances and with a large energy investments that almost completely goes into losses. That way, it would basically never happen in nature and it cannot go over significant distances.
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>classical quantum mechanics says it cannot.
"Classical quantum mechanics."
OK, with that phrase, my Physics degree is officially obsolete.
Now I wonder how much time my Ph.D. in Economics & Statistics has left on it . . .
hawk, fortunate that his J.D. won't expire . . .
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Simple:
- Statistics: forever
- Economics: never had any real worth
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It does. Tunneling is instantaneous.
It may be instantaneous, but what, if anything, is actually "travelling"?
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The "signal" represented is psi squared, or the probability of finding the particle at a particular position in space. The particle can exist anywhere under that curve. With an energetic enough particle or a small enough potential barrier, the particle can predictable tunnel across the barrier, which is what the video is showing (The video is showing the probability of the particle tunneling).
The tunneling process itself depends on collapsing the wavefunction and the particle interacting with some other phy
BS right in the first sentence (Score:3)
Dear OP, transistors are f****** semiconductors! The rest of the article is at best starry-eyed fantasy.
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They were doing a cold fusion experiment, and discovered telepathic yogurt..
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Dear OP, transistors are f****** semiconductors!
Strictly speaking transistors are made of semiconductor materials. Calling the devices themselves semiconductors is just an informal shorthand.
The rest of the article is at best starry-eyed fantasy.
Would you care to elaborate on why?
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Strictly speaking "transistors" are any circuit element that involves a "transfer resistance", i.e. a parameter that is resistance-like and dynamically controlled by another parameter.
Junction transistors do this one way. Field effect transistors do it a completely different way (or perhaps more than one different ways). Both of those happen to be implemented with semiconductors.
This voltage-variable tunneling along gold decorations on a non-conducting nanotube is a transfer resistance and the mechanism o
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transistors have doped semiconductors, and some also might have a layer of another material
Betteridge's law of hypothetical statements (Score:3)
Obligatory... (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, just imagine a beowulf cluster of whatever this article is about...
First Application (Score:2)
Warp What? (Score:2)
warp even the most basic rules of physics
Now that is a meaningless phrase if I ever saw one. Could someone explain what the fuck was the submitter thinking while writing this nonsense?
Disappointing (Score:2)
Unfortunately these threads have degenerated into YASSS (yet another Slashdot science seminar), where a few insightful or useful comments are made, and everyone else is trying to prove they remember or misremember their freshman physics. There has been almost no discussion of the tunneling device, which is a shame because I'd love to hear from people who have a better understanding than me.
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But space isn't something. Period. That's why expansion of distance between two somethings with nothing between can exceed light speed.
As far as we understand it right now, I should add.
Re:Faster than Light? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know a few famous physicists that would disagree with you on your argument that space is "nothing" and isn't "something." "Empty space" isn't actually empty at all, and space-time itself has lots of intrinsic properties. I believe there's a NOVA special on the subject available online for free if you'd like to investigate.
For instance, if you were to start spinning in empty space and no other matter or light in the universe existed (yet you were still somehow alive), you would still feel your arms being pulled outward due to your spinning motion -- even though you had no point of reference to even know that you were spinning at all. You'd still be spinning in relation to the invisible framework of space-time.
On an unrelated note, there is a controversial quantum theory that light speed in empty space is not a finite speed, but an average speed. Further, an expansion on that same theory is that photons travel at infinite speed, but in the medium of empty space, they randomly hit virtual particles which absorb and re-emit them which is what slows them down to what we measure as light speed. The rate of hitting virtual particles can be predicted statistically and works out to be in line with what one would expect in order to get the current measurement for light speed, but it could all be wishful thinking and tinkering with math.
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Wouldn't that disagree with the fact that the measured speed of light in vacuum, by any observer traveling at any speed, is the same? If the speed of light is just a matter of light being slowed down by virtual particles, there's no reason why your own speed wouldn't be added to or subtracted from the speed of a particular beam of light. Relativity would just go right out the window, we're back to aether theory.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w9eoZtnJSA
Period.
Re:Faster than Light? (Score:5, Informative)
Faster than light expansion is just a mathematical oddity caused by the use of a particular coordinate system. Not that there's anything wrong with it, just that nobody ever seems to explain it properly.
Local distances and times are easy to measure objectively using clocks and measuring rods, but the definition is not so clear and unambiguous anymore when you're talking about large distances in the expanding universe. Different metrics exist, defining distances, times and speeds in a different way, yielding wildly different values while giving the same tangible results for any actual event. I will give you two ways of looking at the universe: the first conserves the speed of light but looks very weird, while the other looks more normal but does not respect Special Relativity. Under General Relativity, which allows a wider range of metrics, both models are perfectly valid and consistent. I will disregard the effects of gravity, but otherwise it should be a pretty accurate description, certainly enough to explain what "space itself" really means.
If you define distances, times and speeds using the common sense definitions from Special Relativity (using beams of light to measure distances, always assuming a constant speed of light), distant galaxies are traveling away from us at high speeds (but less than the speed of light) and therefore time passes more slowly for them. Since this has been the case ever since the big bang, they are younger than us at this point in time. They don't just look younger because we had to wait for their light to get here, but they really are younger "right now" even if we take the traveling time of light into account. If we could "look" at them directly without having to wait for the light to get here, like we could do in a mathematical model, we would "see" the universe getting younger and younger, and clocks ticking ever more slowly, the further out we "look" in our expanding universe. At a distance of c times the age of the universe, the big bang is happening "right now". This gives the universe a finite size (assuming nothing existed before the big bang) but it does contain an infinite amount of matter thanks to Lorentz contraction. Everything near the boundary is squished in the direction of the expansion so that an infinite amount of stuff fits in this finite amount of space.
This metric is a bit cumbersome because it gives us a special position at the center of the universe while in fact there's nothing special about our position at all. Some other, distant civilisation (in the distant future according to the above metric) will actually say that we don't exist yet and our galaxy is much younger than theirs, "now". (Using their definition of "now"). That's just the classic twin paradox, nothing really wrong with that, but it does make our point of view a bit subjective.
So cosmologists came up with a better metric, the cosmological model: they define time as whatever is measured by local clocks that are traveling at the same speed as the average galaxy in that area (the expansion speed vector), undoing time dilation due to the expansion and thereby making the whole universe the same age. Local distances are defined in such a way that objects look pretty much the same size everywhere (no Lorentz contraction due to expansion speed), which can be achieved by defining distances in function of a constant speed of light relative to the expanding universe. So in effect we stretched the universe and sped it up, just by using a different definition of "now" and by measuring distances differently. With this model, the universe looks nicely homogenous and truly infinite, making many calculations a lot easier. There's no longer anything special about our location.
But because we changed our definitions of space and time, some of the old assumptions from special relativity are no longer valid. Things can and do fly away from us at speeds well in excess of the speed of light simply because we are defining their speed differently. But the light from those places will ne
Re:Faster than Light? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tunneling is instantaneous. A tunneling electron (for example) jumps from one position to another. It does not cross the intermediate space, so you can say it actually does not go FTL, because it does not "travel" in a very real sense. Tunneling is a very well established effect. For example in Zener-Diodes with 5.6V about half of the noise produced is tunneling, and about half is thermal.
So, sorry, you are wrong. What is unclear though is whether tunneling can carry information. There is some indication that it can, but it would probably be severely distance limited (read: centimeters to meters at best) and hence not play any role in the larger scheme of things.
Re:Faster than Light? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is unclear though is whether tunneling can carry information. There is some indication that it can...
No that is clear - it cannot [wikipedia.org]. If it could, and if there was any indication that it could, it would be direct evidence of the violation of causality. This is a "Big Thing" at ANY scale because all I have to do is find an intertial frame where the receipt of the information precedes its reception and then stop the information being transmitted. Having this restricted to a distance of a few cm just makes the resulting paradox less entertaining, but just as implausible, as the ones you see on Star Trek.
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Oh, it decidedly can. I was imprecise: The question is whether tunneling can transport information FTL.
Re:Faster than Light? (Score:5, Interesting)
Found this on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Faster_light_.28Casimir_vacuum_and_quantum_tunnelling.29 [wikipedia.org]
Faster light (Casimir vacuum and quantum tunnelling)
Raymond Y. Chiao was first to measure the quantum tunnelling time, which was found to be between 1.5 to 1.7 times the speed of light.
Einstein's equations of special relativity postulate that the speed of light in a vacuum is invariant in inertial frames. That is, it will be the same from any frame of reference moving at a constant speed. The equations do not specify any particular value for the speed of the light, which is an experimentally determined quantity for a fixed unit of length. Since 1983, the SI unit of length (the meter) has been defined using the speed of light.
The experimental determination has been made in vacuum. However, the vacuum we know is not the only possible vacuum which can exist. The vacuum has energy associated with it, unsurprisingly called the vacuum energy. This vacuum energy can perhaps be changed in certain cases.[38] When vacuum energy is lowered, light itself has been predicted to go faster than the standard value c.
Re:Faster than Light? (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason why this is not a problem is because the electron does not actually travel from one point to the other, which would mean there were intermediary points of existence along the way. This is a quantum movement. The electron stops probably being at one place and becomes more probably in another place. It never was in any “place” to start with since placeness is not a quality of an lepton in motion.. Nevertheless, the event of the movement from one probability to the next is not really time measurable as an event, only as a measured effect.
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Can't the slashdot editors be more active with their copy? Nothing goes faster than light. period.
Not true. A shadow can move faster than light. If a wavefront is impacting a linear object, the impact point can move far faster than the propagation speed of the wave. Researchers have found numerous "action at a distance" phenomena that occur instantaneously between entangled particles. None of these phenomena can transmit information, but they are still faster than light.
FTL, yes but no info (Score:5, Informative)
Can't the slashdot editors be more active with their copy? Nothing goes faster than light. period.
Correction: no information travels faster than light. It is easy to imagine a system which looks like something is moving faster than light: shine a bright enough torch on the moon. If you move the torch fast enough it will look like the spot on the Moon is moving faster than light. This is perfectly fine because there is no way to change the where the beam moves if you happen to be where the beam is pointing at a particular time i.e. no information flows between one spot and the next because everything is under the control of the torch wielder back on earth.
In QM tunnelling the transmission speed of information is always below the speed fo light and so there is no problem (if you know secondary [high] school physics this is like the difference between phase velocity and group velocity of a wave in a wave guide). However where the editors messed up is the statement:
...in circuits that warp even the most basic rules of physics.
These circuit DO NOT warp the basic rules of physics. Quantum mechanics IS a "basic rule of physics" - it is certainly counterintuitive but it is a fundamental rule of physics.
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If information was transferred from A to B faster than light, between the event at A and at B is a space like interval, and thus there is a reference frame such that the event at B occurred before the one at A, which violates causality (Since the event at A caused the event at B).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime#Space-like_interval
I hope that clears up the issue for you!
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Who says no information travels faster than light? It always seemed arbitrary to me.
How else do you describe the laws of the universe we inhabit? Gravity that falls off in strength 1/r^2? Who says that should be so? Why should things not be able to go faster than light, why should time slow down when moving faster or when closer to a massive object?
Well no one really said this is the way is must be. What has been said is that is the way it *is* from what we see and measure. It is quite arbitrary. But we have a lot of experiments and data that says its that way. These same measurements
Some problems with your post (Score:2)
1) no matter how fast you move the torch, you will not see the torch's shadow move faster than the speed of light. The shadow will not be in sync with the torch's position, it will lag behind.
What you said violates the principle you stated, i.e. no information can travel faster than the speed of light. But a shadow could be used like a signalling device, and so if it appears to be moving faster than light, then we would have information transmitted faster than light as well.
2) Quamtum tunneling is indeed fa
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No it won't.
Probably an easier example: imagine this. You have a really good laser pointer. You shine it on one side of the moon and then quickly move it so the spot is now on the other side of the moon. The spot tracks across the moon's surface faster than the speed of light. It won't lag behind. However no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light this way since to actually transmit information from one side of the moon to the other via the laser, you need to make the full round trip t
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This article seems to disagree with you:
http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-entanglement-speed-10000-faster-light/26587/ [gizmag.com]
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That would be everyone.
Re:Faster than Light? (Score:5, Informative)
Usually Nerval's Lobster promotes self-described tech-writer-gun-for-hire/Slashdot "editor" Nick Kolakowski's work [slashdot.org]. In this case, the author of the Slashdot content is Kevin Fogarty [slashdot.org], who recently brought us such gems as thinly-disguised press releases for Cumulus Networks [slashdot.org], Enterasys [slashdot.org], and Heavy Reading [slashdot.org], all of which use curiously-similar ambiguous stock photos from Shutterstock... My guess: the people behind the article (which we can't read) paid for it to be summarized and posted on Slashdot so they could pursue further funding by claiming their work has been "featured" (legitimized) on Slashdot.
This has been going on for some time now with Nerval's Lobster. Many people have learned not to feed the troll (don't post comments on Nerval's Lobster submissions), but if you're just joining us, welcome! And try not to feed the troll.
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Re:Faster than Light? (Score:5, Informative)
But what if you have a mile long pole and correlate it's movements into a form of communication. As soon as you move the pole on one end it would instantaneously move on the other for instantaneous communication.
Nope. The motion propagates to the far end at the speed of sound in the pole - much faster than sound in air, but glacial compared to light in vacuum.
Don't bother looking for an unobtanium with near-infinite stiffness and an internal speed of sound faster than light-in-vacuum. The motion at one end encodes information about what is happening at that end and that information is propagated down the pole by interactions between the pole's component particles, interactions that all are no faster than the speed of light.
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I don't understand that explanation, but anyway...
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Why would it?
The atoms in the material are not "conjoined", there are no solid things pushing against each other. They are point forces that act upon each other. The closer they are, the more they will "push" away the other, like atomic springs. But they aren't touching to begin with, merely held in a nice "valley" of forces where they can rest naturally in a particular material. In a dense material, that valley is probably closer to other atoms than in a less dense one but at no point are the protons f
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Oh that's why F=G(m1*m2)/r^2 has the "speed limit" of 'c' in it. Oh wait it doesn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation [wikipedia.org]
Oh that is why Gravity is capped by the "speed limit" of 'c'. Oh wait it doesn't.
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp [metaresearch.org]
That's why we can measure the speed of gravity with light. Oh wait we can't.
"Propagation Speed of Gravity and the Relativistic Time Delay"
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/590/2/683/fulltext/57516.text.html [iop.org]
You are ignorant.
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Look, it's not a religion, you were taught a set of beliefs and you refuse to question them. Why?
period.
I'd like to think that some day we'll figure out how to make things go faster than light. But we haven't done that yet, and it would be big news if we had. Describing it that way in the summary is simply wrong.
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Or maybe we're in a "circles within circles" period again like we were for the orbiting of the planets. Long ago, it was believed that everything orbited the Earth in perfect circles. When the data didn't line up, additional circles were added to the orbits to make the theory fit the data. It worked to a point, but it was a hideous mess. Making the Sun the center of the solar system and ditching the perfect circles cleaned up the theory a lot. Perhaps one day we'll come up with a theory of the Universe
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Light already travels instantly, provided you sit on the massless photon and check your massless watch (time dilation). It's only when you stand back and admire it passing that 'c' comes into play. And that's not a 'speed', it's a constant like 'pi'. Saying you can go faster than light is like saying you can be rounder than 'pi'.
'Faster' may be the wrong description. Moving in directions that light can't at relatively mundane speeds would accomplish the same thing. I don't claim to know how it could be done and I don't insist it CAN be done. But arriving somewhere earlier than light could from the same starting point does not necessarily mean C has been exceeded.
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Should? Who says? The subatomic world is not a prison where things should be held back by barriers.The fact of tunneling has been known about for some time and "shoulds and shouldn'ts" have nothing to do with it. It's like saying things "want" to fall because of gravity. Just utterly cretinous.
Nature hates being anthropomorphized...
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Look, it's not a religion, you were taught a set of beliefs and you refuse to question them. Why?
period.
you were told to not give all your cash to strangers. so send me all your cash now!
fuck yeah FTL would make semiconductors obsolete. would make a lot of things.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Citation please. I've studied the history of science and you are speaking bullshit. I think you have quite the belief you need to challenge, and you might want to reflect on your own hypocrisy. Are you thinking, for example that Einstein disproved Newton or that quantum mechanics disproved classical physics? Neither of these occurred. Both of these theories simply amplified the previous theory and explained phenomena beyond the previous range of observations. And not surprisingly, relativity and quantum mec
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About the only legitimate scientific theories that I can think of that were overthrown were some pre-tectonic theories of continental formation and, providing you loosen up there definition of science a little bit; notions like phlogiston and the ether. As you say, in almost all cases, new theories didn't so much supplant older theories as incorporate them. Even steady state cosmology played into the Big Bang theory via Einstein's cosmological constant, so while it was falsified, at least one notion based o
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you pretty much made that up. Or you're defining "major advancement" such that it cannot be a major advancement unless it's contradictory to current wisdom.
Regardless, the summary is clearly wrong, because there has been no breakthrough that lets information travel faster than light. If there were, we probably wouldn't be talking about transistors, we'd be talking about that breakthrough.
And the scientific wisdom is almost always right -- that's why it's so impressive when it's wrong. You absolutely should treat any claim of FTL with the same extreme skepticism as hollow Earthism. Especially since it is relatively easy to show (eg. to those with approx. an undergraduate education in a related field, or a precocious high-schooler) that FTL implies the possibility of backward time travel, barring a few really, really conceptually unlikely and unsatisfying scenarios.
In my experience, this notion of "major scientific* advances are always people who don't accept conventional wisdom" only ever seems to come up in discussions about the speed of light, in discussions about global warming, and in discussions about Young Earth Creationism. I might be forgetting a couple. But I think the unifying feature is that people really, really *want* the truth to be different from what all the evidence points to, because that would be so awesome. Well, the awesomeness is debatable in terms of YEC, but it would be really cool if global climate change were something that'll sort itself out without us, or if the speed of light turned out to be just a trivial matter and all the stupid scientists were just dribbling their lips with their fingers instead of pressing harder on the gas pedal. It's just not what anything points to and we should demand extraordinary evidence of claims to the contrary just like we would demand extraordinary evidence of a machine that resurrects people hundreds of years dead with their memories intact. Okay, maybe that latter claim is even more unlikely to be true -- but then again the extraordinary evidence should be a bit easier to produce if it is true, so I think that balances.
*For political advances people say this all the time. It's often how they defend people like Stallman for being an asshole, or Gates or Jobs or Torvalds etc..
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reread the history of your profession. You are astoundingly wrong, though I'll admit the early examples are more impressive by dint of resulting in imprisonment, torture, and such. Even today though it's not difficult to find classical and M theorist zealots calling each other crackpots or worse.
I'm not taking issue with the FTL wrongness in the article. I'm taking issue with those who believe something to be Truth rather than theory. That is a hallmark of religion not science. Theory means "This is true as far as I can tell. If you can prove otherwise, have at it."
As for my definition, nobody ever became famous for making steady, incremental advancement in their field. Greatness comes from turning things on their ear and thinking the thoughts that your peers would never even consider.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bob Widlar. Luther Burbank. George Washington Carver.
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As for my definition, nobody ever became famous for making steady, incremental advancement in their field.
So the real argument is about the word "incremental"? Einstein did not discover the Lorentz invariant, he did not discover the photoelectric effect, he did not discover the black-body quantization of Max Planck, and Planck did not discover the idea of quantization... Everything has been an incremental advance for various values of "incremental".
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Regardless, the summary is clearly wrong, because there has been no breakthrough that lets information travel faster than light. If there were, we probably wouldn't be talking about transistors, we'd be talking about that breakthrough.
I guess you are the wrong one here. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Faster_light_.28Casimir_vacuum_and_quantum_tunnelling.29 [wikipedia.org]
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But you don't get a real degree without adhering to the "current wisdom". The problem here is one of inertia.
To get a degree you are taught the "current wisdom" - yes
Your job after that point is to extend / amend it
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Put up is one option. Shut up is the other option.
And a third option is to shit on the troll instead of throwing food over the bridge.
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The first smelted iron in the history of our species was found in East Africa
Put that in your pipe, you waste of oxygen, and smoke it.
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On a TED talk, the speaker said electrons travel the speed of spreading honey in wires.
Is that related to your point and the benefits of this technique?
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Re:Sorry to those in the religion of Einsteinianis (Score:5, Informative)
Phase velocity exceeds c, not group velocity. If you guys wanna prove Einstein wrong, you're gonna have to work a little harder.
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Except a "theory" is the top of the food chain in having already been proven right. There is no state higher on the path to being a fact.
So yes, the only remaining option after being shown to be correct 100% of the time each and every time, is to be proven wrong.
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Since Einstein hasn't been proven right
Probably because you can never prove a scientific theory right. You can however repeatedly fail to prove it wrong, and that's been done many many times w/ Einstein's theories.
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Wrong. Tunneling is instantaneous and it is a well-established mechanism. It has severe distance limits and the question is whether it can transfer information FTL.
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the problems:
BQP=BPP?
P=NP?
Those problems have nothing to do with speed of propagation of information. Structure of space is not implied by the Turing computation model.
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Nothing you said made any sense. You took a physics problem and called it equivalent to two computational problems that are unrelated to the physical problem, related to each other, but not in any way equivalent.
"whether relativity settles FTL (it doesn't)" is word soup.
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Or, as incredibly unlikely as it is, you could've actually discovered some little corner case that no one else thought to test for, and thus hasn't written a law/theory/etc. (or updated an existing one) to cover it.
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So, reading that text file (text file? Also, did you count the number of exclamation marks?), this guy did a $1000 experiment which showed that the speed of light, one of the most widely studied and precisely quantities in physics for the last 200 years, is wrong? Right...