Engineers in aerospace are always interested in sending information faster – instantaneously, if possible. Think about the one hour 20 minutes delay in a command signal to the Cassini spacecraft around Saturn.
Now there are claims of using quantum tunneling to send signals over short distances at super-luminal (>c) speed. Gunter Nimtz and colleagues claimed to have transmitted Mozart’s Symphony No.40 at 4.7 times the speed of light through a tunneling barrier. How’s that possible?
Most scientists agree that some effects can propagate at faster than the speed of light, but that no useful information can be sent that way. Nimtz did the ‘Mozart trick” and apparently claimed: “if that’s not information, then I don’t know what information is”. The question is: can Nimtz prove that the information actually went over his link at faster than light? I do not think so.
It is one thing to send RF pulses and time the transmission delay per pulse. Such delays are not very well defined in this sort of experiment, because information needs the whole pulse, not just the leading edge. My view is that he did a test where some sort of effect could be measured to have propagated at faster than light and then pumped Mozart over the link and said “viola!”. How did he know the music went over faster than light?
SL: Your Aerospace Watchdog
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