What's this about transmitting data faster than the speed of light? =}
http://scitechdaily.com/nanometer-scale-material-capable-of-straightening-and-speeding-up-light-waves/
(tl;dr- scientists created a material that allows light to pass through it near-infinitely fast. If they can scale it up, it has potential applications in computer processors and communication technologies)
Transmitting data off our planet would still be limited by the speed of light, though.... for now, anyway.
Honestly, if an article tells me that "A nanometer is one billionth of a meter" I highly doubt that this article is intended for people that actually understand science. And if you read the entire article, you can see that they haven't actually created this "meta-atom" yet. They think it's possible, but they haven't made one yet.
Obviously, if they do manage to make such a material, that's great. But until then I'll stick with "Cool theory, but where's the actual stuff?".
The site does try to make things more understandable for people who don't have a PhD in everything the write about, but that's not to say it's dumbed down. Sometimes they throw in stuff that's fairly obvious, but it doesn't hurt to include it. Also, materials have been produced with epsilon-near-zero that work in the microwave frequency range, which they briefly mentioned in that article.
Anyway, it seems I was misunderstanding some stuff. The 'faster than light' stuff they're referring to is the phase velocity of the photons, which apparently can't be used to transmit data alone. From what i read in scientific journals on this stuff, data transmission is also related to group velocity, which is directly related to phase velocity in this case. Apparently, the group velocity in this case is near 0. Basically, it's not possible to transmit data faster than light.
They were throwing around words like "faster than light" and "tunneling," so it's not hard to make certain assumptions. It didn't help that the journals mentioned it had uses in communications systems and such. Oh well, it's not like it was deliberately misleading so much as confusingly worded... Sometimes I wish I had a physicist friend who could tell me when I'm wrong about things.
