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RE: Semi-on-topic: Light that travels faster than the speed of light?

  • From: Fergie (Paul Ferguson)
  • Date: Sat Aug 20 14:30:29 2005

Well, I would imagine that the faster you can ship the bits,
the faster anything can happen -- including BGP convergence and
botnet attacks (too!).  :-)

Yeah, I realize that the possibility to actually "speed up"
light via the optical transmission systems may be a long
ways off (or simply impossible in practicality!), but I
thought this was interesting.

- ferg


-- "Buhrmaster, Gary" <[email protected]> wrote:

To make this operational, will this speed up BGP convergence?

(note that there is a difference between group velocity
and phase velocity.  The posters of "300,000 Kilometers Per
Second. It's Not Just a Good Idea, It's the Law!" are still
valid). 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
> Behalf Of Fergie (Paul Ferguson)
> Sent: Saturday, August 20, 2005 10:40 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Semi-on-topic: Light that travels faster than the 
> speed of light?
> 
> 
> Man, I knew I should've gotten in on the ground floor in
>  any effort to speed up light -- someone's going to be
> rich beyond their wildest dreams. :-)
> 
> (Thanks to a post over at Slashdot) the Science Blog
> reports that:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique F�d�rale 
> de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the 
> first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light 
> - both slowing it down and speeding it up - in an optical 
> fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal 
> environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in 
> the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have 
> implications that range from optical computing to the 
> fiber-optic telecommunications industry.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> http://www.scienceblog.com/light.html
> 
> - ferg
> 
> --
> "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
>  Engineering Architecture for the Internet
>  [email protected] or [email protected]
>  ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
> 
>