{"id":769475,"date":"2026-05-03T02:20:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T02:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/769475\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T02:20:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T02:20:28","slug":"whats-faster-than-light-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/769475\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s faster than light? Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"

The speed of light in a vacuum has been known as both a universal constant and a hard speed limit for all matter in the universe ever since Albert Einstein<\/a> published his special theory of relativity in 1905. Rules, however, are made to be broken. And an international team of physicists appears to have found just such a loophole: the only thing that goes faster than light, it turns out, is darkness.<\/p>\n

More specifically, individual dark spots known as optical vortices, or phase singularities, do so. As a light wave travels through space, it oscillates and twists\u2014at the center of that twist, the peaks and troughs of the light wave cancel each other out, creating dark spots that\u2014under certain conditions\u2014outrun the light wave itself. The research was conducted by Technion\u2013Israel Institute of Technology physicist Ido Kaminer and his colleagues.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur discovery reveals universal laws of nature shared by all types of waves, from sound waves and fluid flows to complex systems such as superconductors,\u201d Kaminer said in a statement<\/a>. The discovery confirms a prediction dating to the 1970s. Importantly, these vortices don\u2019t carry mass, energy or information, so they don\u2019t violate Einstein\u2019s rules, according to the researchers. \u201cPhase singularities do not carry energy or information and thus can \u2018move\u2019 superluminally without breaking causality,\u201d the physicists wrote in their study<\/a>, which was published last month in Nature.<\/p>\n

Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter from Scientific American and join a community of science-loving readers.<\/a><\/p>\n

To make their discovery, the researchers constructed a unique microscope system that let them observe optical vortices in hexagonal boron nitride, a two-dimensional form of ceramic that can be used to convert light into quasiparticles<\/a> that are a mixture of light and matter called polaritons. Polaritons move relatively sluggishly\u2014around 100 times slower than the speed of light. With that speed, the team was able to observe how oppositely charged singularities approached each other and accelerated each other to superluminal, or faster-than-light, speeds before they were annihilated.<\/p>\n

The technique used to measure the singularities\u2019 velocity could open the door to studying other tiny, fast phenomena in physics, chemistry and biology\u2014or perhaps to find new ways to encode quantum information in materials, according to the researchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe these innovative microscopy techniques will enable the study of hidden processes in physics, chemistry, and biology, revealing for the first time how nature behaves in its fastest and most elusive moments,” Kaminer said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The speed of light in a vacuum has been known as both a universal constant and a hard…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":769476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[48619,315543,315542,293415,288465,492,159,132861,293570,67,132,315544,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-769475","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-albert-einstein","9":"tag-light-and-matter","10":"tag-light-wave","11":"tag-optical-vortices","12":"tag-phase-singularities","13":"tag-physics","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-speed-limit","16":"tag-speed-of-light","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-universal-constant","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116508257689022567","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/769476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}