Sound traveling faster than light - the next generation of Snake Oil products

[wilkenboy]

Coming soon to a speaker / speaker wire / snake-oil peddler near you:

http://www.physorg.com/news88249076.html

The physics here is very real and solid- in this case they created a phase that propogated faster than light, but not an amplitude wave.

I just can't wait for some punk to grab a hold of this and twist it into a speaker marketing campaign.

~Josh

 

[furrycute]

I am having trouble understanding what the article is actually saying. Granted I have long forgotten most of my high school physics.

It sounds like the article is saying that if you break down a complex sound wave down into its individual single frequency components, and you add up the speed of all these individual single frequency components, then you have a theoretical speed of propagation that exceeds the speed of light.

Am I getting this correctly? My physics is a bit rusty here, but if you perform a fourier transform of any complex soundwave, you are going to end up with thousands (if not more) of individual frequency components. Multiply the speed of sound by however many individual frequencies you come up with, of course theoretically that number can exceed the speed of light.

 

[Geno]

Don't forget, this was from Tennessee...

 

[wilkenboy]

The physics is waveguide theory which is more at the college level... basically what this says is that the phase of a signal can propogate at speeds faster than the amplitude wave travels. Its not new physics or a new discovery, whats impressive here is that they actually were able to demonstrate it with sound, which is substantially slower than light.

~Josh