Light wins the race against time and meets itself back at the starting line before the race starts: The speed of light has been illuminated. In a spot, light can travel faster than the traditional speed of light, slower, and… dun. dun. dun. Backwards.
The latest web of physics has been elegantly spun by Mr. Robert Boyd, professor of Optics at the University of Rochester. Like gold out of thin air, Mr. Boyd has carefully pulled his resources together to astound the scientific community with an elegant experiment that educes how all how light can move backwards. What would appear upsetting to any physics student is the obvious contradiction with Einstein’s premises for relativity: “ Light travels at constant speeds, and nothing can move faster than that constant speed (equal to about 299,792,458 meters per second).”
Boyd’s experiment examines the speed of light sent through an optical fiber, coated in a layer of the element erbium. Why erbium? The element (like all other elements) has its own list of characteristics, one of which happens to be a sort of “fun house” effect. Erbium acts on an optical fiber the way a curve, carefully placed in a mirror acts to distort the path of light. Boyd’s experiment was to send a pulse from a laser beam through the optical fiber and measure the time lapse between light waves entering and exiting the fiber (i.e. measure the speed of light).
In 1999, researchers raised a crucial question about the constancy of light. As it was beginning to appear to the scientific community, observational evidence heavily supported the theory of the Big Bang, and new observations delivered the conclusion that the universe was indeed, expanding. Given this framework with relativistic mathematics, a new problem arose: in the earliest moments of the universe’ birth, the expansion of matter and space was so rapid that it mathematically surpassed the speed of light.
How can matter move faster than light, when supposedly nothing, not even light can move faster than light? It seemed to go against all the laws of Relative Physics; Einstein was surely rolling in his grave.
“Einstein said information can’t travel faster than light, and in this case, as with all fast-light experiments, no information is truly moving faster than light,” explains Boyd.
It was in the next few years that a series of experiments illustrated a most fascinating quark of light speed: under certain conditions, light can be slowed to speeds less than that of an airplane, accelerated to frightening speeds, or otherwise adopt speeds other than the uniform constant speed of light. Given exotic conditions, materials, and a few ingenious lab experiments, light was found to be malleable.
However, it wasn’t until last week that the concept of “negative speed” which has been considered theoretically possible by scientists was pulled out of its hypothetical state and applied to an experimental setting. “Negative speed”- is not speeds decreased to “slower than slow”, but speeds that actually travel backwards through time. Negative speed was proven in Boyd’s fiber optic – laser experiment.
Light Traveling Backwards
“It’s weird stuff,” says Boyd. “We sent a pulse through an optical fiber, and before its peak even entered the fiber, it was exiting the other end. Through experiments we were able to see that the pulse inside the fiber was actually moving backward, linking the input and output pulses.
The pulse of light is shaped like a hump with a peak and long leading and trailing edges. The leading edge carries with it all the information about the pulse and enters the fiber first. By the time the peak enters the fiber, the leading edge is already well ahead, exiting. From the information in that leading edge, the fiber essentially ‘reconstructs’ the pulse at the far end, sending one version out the fiber, and another backward toward the beginning of the fiber.”
In the article posted at Physorg.com about Boyd’s experiments, a nice analogy is made for thinking about backwards moving light. The comparison is to consider a fun house mirror. In the old carnival mirrors that make you appear super fat, you’ll notice that as you approach one from the side your reflection seems to “wait” a bit until you cross an invisible line, at which point your reflected body expands almost instantly ahead of yourself and you’re left with a rather daunting glimpse at your future.
But just down the hall you come upon another mirror.
This mirror seems to ignore you as walk up to it. You have to stand right in front of it to see yourself, and this time when you do you’re monsterously skinny . This mirror is simply curved differently than the other mirror, but both act on the same principle: by bending light through a curve, the speed is changed along with the topography of the image produced (your reflection).
That is essentially how light is “sped” up or “slowed” down. The rate of exchange of information has changed, the actual light waves have been altered to fit the curvature of space, but the information has remained the same.
In Negative speeds, the light waves are bent to fill the opposite end of the fun-house mirror before filling up the side it entered from. The light wave meets itself in the center of its universe, having reached its destination and traveled backwards towards where it began. In this universe, like your common Kline bottle universe, the ends are not ends but rather opposite sides of a curve that you move through.
It’s something of a mind bender, but if you’re willing to accept the fat and skinny reflections of yourself as still being concurrent with reality, you must also allow yourself to accept that your image is a reproduction of light; that light is bent by the curvatures in space. And now we must not discount the possibility that given all the curved mirrors in the universe, there might just be one curvature that yields a reflection of you in another universe. Or perhaps one of you as you were back in time.
It seems to me, the question of light speed consistency is not one of universal constants, but one of magic mirrors, glimpses into alternate realities, and overall the possibilities made available to us in this wonderland world.
Posted by Liz Mathews on November 12th, 2006 under Spirituality. Comments: 35 | EMail This Post
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