Oolite Bulletins

What CERN did was just peanuts. According to a dutch newspaper, has the nasa technology in house to send pictures from mars to earth within 5 minutes. Comparing the distance with the speed of light , that must mean that the data travels several times the speed of light. Source translated with google translate:"Technisch Weekblad'

Somehow there went something wrong in popularising the article. The original source of NASA tels a bit different story: NASA

Eric Walch wrote:

What CERN did was just peanuts. According to a dutch newspaper, has the nasa technology in house to send pictures from mars to earth within 5 minutes. Comparing the distance with the speed of light , that must mean that the data travels several times the speed of light. Source translated with google translate:"Technisch Weekblad'

According to http://www.universetoday.com/14824/dist ... h-to-mars/ the distance varies between 56 & 401 million km, so 5 mins seems reasonable for part of that range at the speed of light, given that 93 million miles is 8 minutes away . . . or have I missed something? Also, the translated link does not appear to claim faster than light comms. Then again, I am very tired ATM . . .

Neutrinos are strange little critters anyhow, seeming to pass through solid matter like it doesn't exist.

Now a particle that's been said to be FTL for awhile now: the tachyon.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Now a particle that's been said to be FTL for awhile now: the tachyon.

A hypothetical particle, though ... hypothetically, a tachyon could just be an ordinary particle travelling backwards in time. It could be a huge purple hippo travelling backwards in time, too, speaking hippothetically.

Terry Pratchett theorised (sort of) that the only thing to travel faster than light is monarchy. The instant a king or queen dies, their heir succeeds them – with no interval of time between. The faster-than-light kingons and queenons sometimes get cancelled out if they hit a republicon, though.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Neutrinos are strange little critters anyhow, seeming to pass through solid matter like it doesn't exist.

Now a particle that's been said to be FTL for awhile now: the tachyon.

Indeed, which is why I brought them up at the beginning of the thread. (and since, if they actually exist, they're already travelling faster than light, that's not the same as something this side of the light barrier somehow being accelerated beyond what we know/hope/expect to be the speed of light)

I spent a year helping to look for neutrinos ("man-made" ones - not cosmic ones) - several million litres of cleaning fluid and a bank of highly sensitive photodetectors - the only thing I discovered about them is they're bloody annoying things to track down.