Criticizing assumptions
"Faster-than-light time tunnels or photons" (SN: 7/2/94, p.6) makes two amazing statements. The first, "Recent experiments…show that photons tunnel through a barrier at velocities considerably greater than the speed of light in a vacuum." The second, "This result doesn’t necessarily violate the notion that cause precedes effect."
What amazes me is the assumption that information traveling faster than c represents a violation of causality! Causality simply means that the cause of an event precedes the effect of the event. In this case, for example, a photon is emitted before it is absorbed in a detector. If the travel time were 1 million times faster than c, the cause would still precede the effect, and causality would not be violated.
Somehow, uncritical acceptance of the theory of relativity has become so great that it is now assumed, even by the physicists testing such effects, that information transfer in excess of c violates causality! All that is actually violated in this case is Einstein’s second postulate – that the speed of light is a constant, equal to c.
Curt Renshaw
crenshaw@teleinc.com 