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What’s faster than light? Darkness (www.scientificamerican.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by cm0002@lemy.lol to c/science@mander.xyz

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The speed of light in a vacuum has been known as both a universal constant and a hard speed limit for all matter in the universe ever since Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905. Rules, however, are made to be broken. And an international team of physicists appears to have found just such a loophole: the only thing that goes faster than light, it turns out, is darkness.

More specifically, individual dark spots known as optical vortices, or phase singularities, do so. As a light wave travels through space, it oscillates and twists—at the center of that twist, the peaks and troughs of the light wave cancel each other out, creating dark spots that—under certain conditions—outrun the light wave itself. The research was conducted by Technion–Israel Institute of Technology physicist Ido Kaminer and his colleagues.

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[–] Opisek@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 points 2 weeks ago

Eh, attention bait. The "dark spot" is not moving, even ignoring the fact that the dark spot is not a "thing".

It's more like when people at a stadium do a "wave" by raising their hands in a specific order. If everyone raises their hands at the same time, did the wave just move faster than light? No, obviously not, because nothing was moving (laterally) in the first place.

It only looks like it's moving because human brains interpret it as movement, much like an animation.