Re: Speed of Light article

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 03:44 PM 6/1/00 -0500, Paul O. Johnson wrote:

> I think you'll have to admit to your colleagues that
> physicists don't yet completely understand Mother Nature.

There are ALWAYS things we don't know, but I'm not ready to admit this
speed-of-light article tells us anything about Mother Nature that we didn't
already know.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing here but a magic trick.  Basically
it's a word game.  It's not even a new or original word game.

The key terms in the word game are "pulse" (as in "THE pulse") and "arrival
time" (as if the pulse had a single arrival time).  If you try to assign a
single time to "the pulse" you might choose to concentrate on the arrival
time of the PEAK of the pulse -- but you would be glossing over the physics
of the tails.  In fact pulses have tails.  The source starts emitting the
front tail long before it starts emitting the peak of "the pulse".  If your
receiver responds to the front tail, it can respond before the peak
arrives.  Given a nice high-Q emitter (so the pulse is narrow in frequency
and spread out in time) and a nice high-gain receiver, you can anticipate
peak-arrival by an enormous amount.

As far as I can tell, this "discovery" has about the same intellectual
content as my "discovery" that I can anticipate the arrival of the new moon
by watching the waning crescents.