Ftl faster than light sound doesnt work
Turn your wrist so the laser pointer intersects the wall. Now, imagine you are shining the light parallel to an infinite wall. You don't see the laser dot projected anywhere because there is no end to this room. Now, imagine shining a laser pointer straight out into infinite space. This is the first part of Nemiroff's thought experiment. Each flash of light is an isolated event, and they only create the illusion of movement collectively. In theory, it would be possible to have a word move across the screen faster than the speed of light - because nothing has actually moved.
#Ftl faster than light sound doesnt work series#
In reality, the word is created by a series of flashes from many individual, stationary lights. No single photon in the stream ever moves faster than the speed of light, but collectively, they can create the illusion of faster-than-light travel.Īnother way to understand this illusion is to imagine an electronic ticker tape, which creates the illusion of a word moving horizontally across the screen. Nemiroff's experiment doesn't break this physical law because the laser pointer produces a stream of photons, not a single photon. Einstein's theory of special relativity says it is impossible for an object (like a single photon of light) to look as though it is traveling faster than the speed of light.