Nimtz and Stahlhofen concluded that the tunneling particles had crossed the space between the two prisms "instantaneously" and therefore traveled faster than light.īut Einstein's Special Theory of Relatively, one of the basic premises of physics, states that matter or information cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (300,000 kps or 186,000 mps). The physicists discovered that both the reflected and the tunneling signals arrived at their relative detectors at the same time, even though the tunneling particles had to travel a longer distance.
When the microwaves were reflected through the prisms, most of the signal was reflected from the first prism, but a few microwaves "tunneled" through the gap to the second prism. In their experiment, which was reported in the latest edition of New Scientist, Nimtz and Stahlhofen fired microwaves through glass prisms separated by various distances ranging from a couple of centimeters up to one meter. Physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz have been researching a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, where particles apparently go through a barrier they theoretically shouldn't be able to pass.
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