Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Scientists broke the speed of light -- or so we were told. Did the press keep us in the dark, or was it the scientists?
Aug 3, 2000 | A funny thing happens when you shine a light on certain scientists. Unfamiliar with the complex formulas for fame, the logarithms that ensure one's footing, now and then the underexposed teeter before sudden media attention. Some do not flinch -- your Carl Sagans and your Stephen Hawkings glimmer like test tubes -- and yet when others mix with minor celebrity, weird things happen. Maybe it's just chemistry.
On July 20, most major U.S. newspapers reported that researchers at the NEC Research Institute in New Jersey had coerced a laser into breaking the speed of light. This was front-page news at the Washington Post and other dailies, as it should be: Violating a basic principle of the universe -- one of the few we can all get our minds around -- changes just about everything and chases such news out of the science journals and into the headlines.
And now the chief researcher on the NEC project, Lijun Wang, hangs up on journalists.
"I'm not talking," he said. "I know what you people do."
Wang's partners, Alexander Kuzmich and Arthur Dogariu, wouldn't comment either, and Dogariu said, "I am not allowed to speak to the press."
"They're extremely busy," explained Kazuko Andersen, spokeswoman for the institute's parent company, NEC USA.
Probably, but that's not why they're being snippy. It seems the papers had it wrong: Not only does the speed of light remain unsurpassed, but Wang's experiment wasn't even about that.
What Wang wanted to do -- and succeeded in doing -- was much more banal. Far from challenging fundamental rules of nature, the team developed a method of manipulating the wavelengths of a beam of light, thereby altering the way it arrives at its destination. Because short wavelengths become longer and long ones become shorter, the natural fanning outward that marks a light pulse is eliminated; consequently the shape of the pulse at its destination appears the same as at its origin.
This effect, called anomalous dispersion, had never been produced in a transparent medium. The novelty of the experiment was not in the manipulation of the pulse -- physicists have been doing this for years and long ago observed that a certain band of frequencies within a group of waves can arrive at its destination before the rest, even at a rate greater than the speed of light. No, the novelty lay in the 6-centimeter, cesium-filled, clear chamber that hosted this activity. Historically, anomalous dispersion had only been arranged in opaque media.
This is big news for an institute funded by a major telecommunications company -- improved performance in optical fibers could prove valuable -- but no news at all for the average Post reader.
If the recent drama at the institute (the hostility, the rigid refusal to comment) suggests that some of these scientists have seen "The Insider" too many times, the stakes are indeed high in at least one arena: Everything that comes out of the research facility belongs to NEC USA. NEC USA, in turn, belongs to NEC Corp., a vast Japanese technology corporation that competes with Sony and IBM.
The reporting of Wang's experiment generally included none of this information. Strangely, though, nearly every article included a puzzling assurance from Wang that Einstein had not been refuted in any way. The inclusion of this assurance, however correct, made no sense. No explanations were offered, and readers were left to reconcile this promise with the remainder of the report, which did contradict Einstein.
The Dallas Morning News finally got hip to the error on July 25. Tom Siegfried pointed out that the breaking of the speed of light was both inaccurate and nothing new. As recently as May, Italian researchers claimed to have used a mirror to manipulate the flight of microwaves through empty space. The effect was a slightly faster-than-light speed for the microwaves over distances of 1 to 2 feet. The Italian results were attributable to the same phenomenon seen in New Jersey: The light didn't speed up, but rather the peak of its pulse shifted, thereby changing its intensity.
James Chadi, vice president of the science division at the institute, agreed to talk. Beginning the conversation with the diplomacy of a manager -- he regretted Wang's refusal to comment -- Chadi soon lapsed into an impatience of his own, and would say little about the original newspaper reports.
Between extensive explanations of optic fibers and anomalous dispersion, Chadi sketched a picture of negligent reporters, so zealous, he contended, that they didn't read the researchers' report firsthand (published July 20th in Nature), or even talk to them over the phone (during that window of time when the scientists weren't hanging up).
It's not hard to imagine the eagerness that would guide a newspaper reporter past key details. Splashy, readable science stories arrive once a light-year at best, and when they do, they're corralled onto the front pages in a hurry.
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