Related papers: What is faster -- light or gravity?
While special relativity imposes an absolute speed limit at the speed of light, our Universe is not empty Minkowski spacetime. The constituents that fill the interstellar/intergalactic vacuum, including the cosmic microwave background…
The OPERA collaboration has announced to have observed superluminal neutrinos with a mean energy 17.5 GeV, but afterward the superluminal interpretation of the OPERA results has been refuted theoretically by Cherenkov-like radiation and…
In this extended note a critical discussion of an extension of the Lorentz transformations for velocities faster than the speed of light given recently by Hill and Cox is provided. The presented approach reveals the connection between…
We present the theory of special relativity here through the lens of differential geometry. In particular, we explicitly avoid any reference to hypotheses of the form "The laws of physics take the same form in all inertial reference frames"…
First, we extend the special relativity into the superluminal case and put forward a superluminal theory of kinematics, in which we show that the temporal coordinate need exchanging with one of the spatial coordinates in a superluminal…
From an extended relativistic dynamics for a particle moving in a cosmic background field with temperature T, we aim to obtain the speed of light with an explicit dependence on the background temperature of the universe. Although finding…
The paper is based on the recently proposed 4-dimensional optical space theory and draws some of its consequences for gravitation. Starting with the discussion of central movement, the paper proceeds to establish the a metric compatible…
In certain media, light has been observed with group velocities faster than the speed of light. The recent OPERA report of superluminal 17 GeV neutrinos may describe a similar phenomenon.
A basic problem in the relativistic quantum Hamilton-Jacobi theory is to understand whether it may admit superluminal solutions. Here we consider the averaging of the speed on a period of the oscillating term which is similar to Dirac's…
If Lorentz invariance is only an approximate property of equations describing a sector of matter above some critical distance scale, the speed of light c will not necessarily be the only critical speed in vacuum. Superluminal sectors of…
In quantum theory, the curved spacetime of Einstein's general theory of relativity acts as a dispersive optical medium for the propagation of light. Gravitational rainbows and birefringence replace the classical picture of light rays…
As is well-known, Newton's gravitational theory can be formulated as a four-dimensional space-time theory and follows as singular limit from Einstein's theory, if the velocity of light tends to the infinity. Here 'singular' stands for the…
We propose a new generalisation of general relativity which incorporates a variation in both the speed of light in vacuum (c) and the gravitational constant (G) and which is both covariant and Lorentz invariant. We solve the generalised…
A simple general relativity theory for objects moving in gravitational fields is developed based on studying the behavior of an atom in a gravitational field. The theory is applied to calculate the satellite time dilation, light deflection…
This essay is about superluminal motion. It is generally believed that special relativity prohibits movements faster than the speed of light. It is explained which motion is actually forbidden by special relativity and why. Tachyons are…
General relativity is incomplete because it cannot describe quantum effects of space-time. The complete theory of quantum gravity is not yet known and to date no observational evidence exists that space-time is quantized. However, in most…
Special theory of relativity has been formulated in a vacuum momentum-energy representation which is equivalent to Einstein special relativity and predicts just the same results as it. Although in this sense such a formulation would be at…
There have been a number of papers proposing that the light speed of a homogeneous and isotropic universe is variable. This paper outlines a simple way that the vectors and tensors of special relativity can be extended to allow such a…
To determine whether the Shapiro time delay of light passing near a moving object depends on the ``speed of gravity'' or the ``speed of light,'' one must analyze observations in a bimetric framework in which these two speeds can be…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…