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Light Speed

Can light go faster, or slower, than light speed? If so, what do we call that speed?

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  • Asked by jminton
  • on 2009-08-08 04:22:48
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Last edited on: 2009-08-08 04:25:09

Categories: Our universe.

Tags: physics, Speedoflight, light.

 

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0urob0ross_ says:

Yes, under the right circumstances.

We frequently hear that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  This is a bit of short-hand, what it usually means is that 'no information can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum'.  It is possible to make groups of light beams that work together to make a pulse of light that travels faster than the speed of light, but no information can be carried by this pulse. When light travels through a medium, such as air or water, it's speed while travelling through that medium is less than the speed of light in a vacuum.  This is still referred to as the speed of light, but would generally be discussed using scientific nomenclature defined in the text or discussion.  For example, c0 ('c' with a subscript zero, I don't know how to type that in this box!) could be used to refer to lightspeed-in-a-vacuum.  The lightspeed-in-media could be referred to by 'c' with a subscript number relating to how much the medium slows light down from c0 (this number is called the refractive index), or a subscript referring to the medium name could be used eg cW for lightspeed-in-water.

Faster-than-light speed is usually called superluminal speed, while theoretical particles that are faster than light are called tachyons, which comes from the Greek for 'swift'.  Superluminal doesn't refer to a specific speed, just anything above c0, and a tachyon is any particle with superluminal speed.

In any given media it is possible that different light beams can travel at different speeds.  Factors that can affect the speed of light in a media include the frequency of the light, more commonly called the colour of the light.  In that respect, one beam of light can travel slower than another beam in the same medium.  This only works in a medium though, in a vacuum light always travels at c0.  In a scientific discussion or calculation, a more rigourous way to define the speed of light in a medium would be to define it as a function of the material's refractive index, frequency, polarisation etc.  The general form would look something like:  c(refractive index, frequency, polarisation) Obviously, this way of referring to speed is not well suited to verbal discussion.

An interesting phenomenon is Cerenkov radiation - this is a blue glow emitted when charged particles travel faster in a medium (eg water) than the speed-of-light-in-that-medium.  The charged particle can travel faster than cW but not faster than c0.  

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posted on 2009-08-18 00:07:56 | Report abuse


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sandra says:

yes, light  exceeds the preferential speed and is called "reflection".

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Tags: physics, Speedoflight, light, photonics.

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posted on 2009-09-07 12:41:52 | Report abuse


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hermawan says:
Light Speed Can light go faster, or slower, than light speed? If so, what do we call that speed? Yes, the light will go slower if it go in a medium such as diamond. We call the light speed if we assume the light go in a vacuum space. But, I think light can't go faster than the light speed.
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posted on 2009-09-25 07:03:22 | Report abuse


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Flix says:

It can.  But it is hard to explain.  Imagine you are chasing a bullet at a certain speed (s)  and you run after it at half S, it will pull away from you at half the speed it was.  but, if you chased light at half its speed it would still pull away at the same rate.  therefore it's travelling at light speed (C) plus half light speed - resulting at a beam of light travelling 1.5C.

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posted on 2009-10-05 19:38:01 | Report abuse

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Dave_Baldock says:

That's incorrect. If you were travelling at half light speed then your time would slow relative to the rate time was progressing before you accelerated. Therefore the speed of the light beam relative to your moving speed would still be light speed. You can't have 1.5 light speed between you and the beam of light.

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posted on 2009-11-13 13:14:17 | Report abuse


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Dinoduck94 says:

It is impossible to go faster than the speed of light (well thats what physics tells us) but you can slow down the speed of light by making it flow through a dense medium. The dense medium would be very much like a car travelling on a smooth road and then suddenly travelling on a muddy field (which would slow it down) but as soon as it left the medium, it would speed up instantly again.

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posted on 2010-03-26 13:44:08 | Report abuse


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