#VELOCITY PHYSICS SERIES#

In order to attract items to their own 15, it entails using force. Thus, to send a single letter of the English alphabet, 8 1's and 0's can be transmitted.Physics may be the 1 branch of physics that is interesting to scientists.

#VELOCITY PHYSICS SERIES#

For example, the letter 'M' is represented by the binary series '01001101'. Any letter of the English alphabet can represented by several 1's and 0's via an established standard like ASCII. There are only two letters or symbols in the alphabet - a 1 and a 0.

Limiting ourselves to a binary alphabet may seem very restrictive, but this is exactly how modern communication systems function.

Taken to the extreme limit, the occurrence of an event that was guaranteed to occur yields no information. Events that were essentially expected carry less information.

Those familiar with information theory will recall that the likelihood of an event affects the amount of information associated with it.

This means that Einstein's special theory of relativity seems to be correct (because it states that the information velocity is less than or equal to the speed of light in vacuum), even though the speed of the peak of the pulse travels faster than the speed of light in vacuum. Yet, when we encoded information on the pulse (i.e, making and transmitting a waveform that we decided a priori represents a 1 or a 0), we found that the information travels at slightly less than the speed of light in vacuum. Over the last 100 years or so, some scientists have said that such an observation contradicts the special theory of relativity. Specifically, we created a medium for which pulses propagated with a group velocity greater than the speed of light in vacuum. Surprisingly, the speed of this information transmission process can be very different from the typical speeds that are used to characterize the propagating of the optical pulse (in this case, we compare it to the so-called group velocity, which describes the speed of the peak of the pulse). We can then arrive at the speed of this information transmission process by dividing the distance between us by the time it took to send the information. The question we are trying to answer is the following: If Michael is located at one location (say, Duke), and Dan is located at another (say, a nice beach in the Bahamas), how long does it take for a single bit (short for 'binary digit', either 0 or 1) of information 1 to travel from Michael to Dan. If so, this could be a violation of the special theory of relativity, and there are all sorts of weird paradoxes that would be possible if that were true. Some people believe that information encoded on light has to travel at this same speed.

We have devised an experiment where the carrier of information (a pulse of light) appears to be traveling faster than the speed of light in vacuum. The same is true with light, and this is the focus of our research. This is because the nature of the sound can change as it propagates, like when you talk through a cardboard tube.Īn optical fiber. But the fact of the matter is that the carrier of the information - the sound wave - can travel at a different speed than the information itself. For most cases, no one has considered the idea that the sound might travel across the field faster than the information. If Dan and Michael are standing on opposite sides of a field, it will take some length of time for sound, and the information encoded on it, to travel across the field. The idea of the speed of information can be understood with this analogy. The real part of communication is agreeing on the alphabet and encoding our thoughts using this alphabet. Thus, the ability to create sounds with our mouth is really only one necessary resource for communicating information. Next, our brain controls our mouth and vocal cords to produce the proper letters of the alphabet (the sounds we associate with A,B,C, etc.) For the person receiving the information, the ears turn the sound waves into electrical signals, which the brain processes into understandable letters of the alphabet. First, we think in our mind what we want to say.

The act of human speech has two processes. In this example, sound is the carrier of the information, but we can't use this carrier until we agree about the alphabet. We then use that alphabet to build up words, etc. First, we need to agree upon an alphabet that we will use for communicating information. For example, having the ability to utter a sound doesn't mean that humans can communicate with each other. But having a 'carrier' doesn't mean that you are communicating information.

Velocity physics