Hypothetically, could something travel faster than the speed of light if it’s traveling in a different medium?

Joopaloop: Hypothetically, could something travel faster than the speed of light if it’s traveling in a different medium?
My Optics lecturer said something about how since light travels in a vacuum, you could, potentially, have something travel faster in a different medium, one other than a vacuum.

True or false?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Riley
true

Answer by Night visions
theres always something new to find out so i wouldnt say false.
besides humans dont know everything.

Answer by Tom
If that medium bends time then yes

but u wouldnt need to with artificial gravity field

Answer by Andrei S
true a simple thought in your brain can travel faster than the speed of light

Answer by Dan B
I would have to say false. Light is known to slow down anytime it enters a medium other than a vacuum. A vacuum offers no resistance to light.

But here’s a concept. Light is traveling toward you at the speed of light. You are traveling toward the light source at the speed of light. Therefore, you are traveling at twice the speed of light relative to the light traveling in the opposite direction you are traveling – relativity theory.

Answer by Mack the Finger
I find this extremely difficult to swallow, honestly. As any entity’s density increases as it approaches light-speed, it’s hard to believe anything could (given our current understanding) possibly travel any faster. As you approach this cosmological speed limit, an INFINITE amount of energy becomes necessary to shatter this barrier because, as you become increasingly heavier as your size contracts (Lorenz Factor), increasingly more energy is needed to push you, first, to the barrier and, then, past it.

I may perhaps be ignorant of some critical information but what I’ve provided above is, in a nutshell, the very problem most physicists quote in rebuke of the possibility of Warp Speed, as it were.

Hope it helps.

Answer by rex
It has been done. Get something traveling in a vacuum just below the speed of light, and then whack it into a medium where it is now traveling at faster thant he speed of light in that medium. The particles that have had this done to them, slow down dramatically, and radiate their previous energy – its called Cerenkov radiation. So , yes – particles can exceed the speed of light, if they are in some medium other than a vacuum, but not for very long.

Answer by elifino
They’ve played some interesting games in the past 10 years with materials that have bizarre dispersion relations (a fancy way of saying how much the medium slows down any given frequency of light). One of the most surprising results was the demonstration of a wave traveling BACKWARDS at 300 times the normal speed of light. It turns out there was no contradiction; no information ever traveled faster than c. Rather it was just a feature of a wave moving that fast; not a real “object” at all.

A more easily visualized example: If you shine a hypothetical perfectly focused laser pointer on a distant planet, in principal you could get the spot to move over the surface faster than the speed of light. But no single bit of information–no single photon–ever moved faster than c. Relativity allows what you might call “apparent” objects (like the spot where a laser pointer hits a surface) to move faster than c, but anything that carries actual information (like a photon, or a baseball) can’t.

At least, not by any means that we’re yet aware of.

Answer by Dan
Seven Hundred years ago, It was a well known fact that the world was flat.

Some time ago it was also a well known fact that the earth was the center of the universe.

Not 100 years ago It was a well known fact that black people were inferior.

Bottom line, It is a current fact that the speed of light is the fastest speed anything in our universe can achieve. Years from now, this may change, and anything and any discovery is possible, but you’re speculating on what we currently have not discovered how to prove and or discover. Your answer is false… for now.

Answer by Philip J
A vacuum is supposedly space with no matter in it. Adding matter, such as air, slows light rather than speeding it up. You would have to put something other than matter in the space to get a different medium. So what else is there besides matter and no matter?

However, in my Fractal Foam Model of Universes, space has substance (ether), and light propagates thru that substance like an acoustic shear wave in a solid. In most solids, pressure waves propagate faster than shear waves. I believe pressure waves propagate thru the ether at the speed of gravity, which is at least 20 billion times faster than light. It is not a different medium, but a different mode of wave motion.