LANL scientist makes radio waves
travel faster than light

Sue Vorenberg | The New Mexican

1/18/2008 - 1/19/08

Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.

Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really the case, Singleton said.

Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light.

The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists, Singleton said.

"Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves in pulses, but what we don't know is why these pulses are so bright or why they travel such long distances," Singleton said. "What we think is these are transmitting the same way our machine does."

And beyond explaining what has been a bit of a mystery to the astronomical community, Singleton's discovery could have wide-ranging technological impacts in areas such as medicine and communications, he said.

"Because nobody's really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field," Singleton said.

One possible use for the resulting speedy radio waves — which are packed into a very powerful wave the size of a pencil point — could be the creation of a new generation of cell phones that communicate directly to satellites, rather than transmitting through relay towers as they now do.

Those phones would have more reliable service and would also be more difficult for hackers to intercept, Singleton said.

Another application could be in very targeted chemotherapy, where a patient takes the drugs, and the radio waves are used to activate them very specifically in the area around a tumor, he said.

The concept of phenomenon traveling faster than light has been discussed in the back alleys of the scientific community since the 1970s, but observations were based on strange aberrations, like the distorted images of stars as they traveled near the speed of light, said Mario Perez, a Los Alamos scientist who worked with Singleton on the project.

"Radio astronomers found sources that looked like things were traveling faster than light, but they were not truly superluminal, like this is," Perez said.

And other effects have also shown the possibility of phenomenon traveling faster than light, but Singleton's experiment has taken that to a new level, Singleton said.

"If you take a laser and shine it on the moon and swing it rather gently, for example, the spot on the moon travels faster than the speed of light," Singleton said. "If an effect can do that, it makes you wonder if you can do things with light to get the equivalent of a sonic boom."

That's what the faster-than-light radio waves — more scientifically known as superluminal transmissions — do. They're the light version of a sonic boom, he said.

"When something travels faster than its own wave speed you get a very large disturbance," Singleton said. "And these powerful signals that result, well, this would be how E.T., if he were out there, would likely try to communicate with us."

If Einstein were still alive, he probably wouldn't be all that surprised by the discovery, Perez said, even if it does seem on the surface to conflict with some of his theories.

"He might have thought, 'why did this take so long,' " Perez said.

Last week, the two scientists presented the work to the American Astronomical Society at its conference in Austin, Texas.

Singleton wasn't sure how it would be received by the astronomical community, but so far, other scientists seem very interested in his work, he said.

"I thought there would be more resistance to it, because traditional astronomers are very resistant to things traveling faster than the speed of light," Singleton said.

In the next few years, the scientists plan to build a series of newer, more powerful machines to further demonstrate the technology, Perez added.

The Department of Energy has given them a three-year,
$3 million grant to work on the project.

And Einstein — he wouldn't be mad about that at all, Singleton said.