I generally dislike
cut and paste nodes, but I thought this was very relevant:
from
WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 21 Jul 00
Washington, DC
1. GROAN!
LIGHT IS REPORTED TO TRAVEL
FASTER THAN LIGHT. The real news in
physics was that the
tau neutrino, the last of the
fermions predicted by the
Standard Model, had been discovered at
Fermilab. But front page headlines across the country were proclaiming, "
The Speed of Light Has Been Broken." It's now going to be impossible to characterize any claim as physically impossible without people scoffing: "
that's what they said about the speed of light." At WN, we're already getting triumphant phone calls and e-mails from
Einstein deniers.
Charles Bennett at
IBM Watson points out that this is little more than a confused rehash of an old story, where the peak of the
wave packet leaving the "
superluminal" medium is causally related to just the leading edge of the wave packet entering the medium. "
Rolf Landauer is dead," Bennett sighed, "and someone needs to complain for him."