Messing with the Laws of Physics

Scientists solve levitation?

Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists....

...Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.

Germans break the Ultimate Speed Limit?

Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz in Germany, claim to have broken the speed of light. They have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons traveled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart, which would be faster than the 186,000 MPH that Albert Einstein once said would take an infinite amount of energy to power.

All of this the same 365-day span that Pluto gets decommissioned and Voyager 1 finds a different part of space.

The more we think we know, the more we find out we don't know...