A group of high school and college teachers and students has transmitted sound pulses faster than light travels-at least according to one understanding of the speed of light. The results conform to Einstein’s theory of relativity, so don’t expect this research to lead to sound-propelled spaceships that fly faster than light. Still, the work could help spur research that boosts the speed of electrical and other signals higher than before. The standard metric for the speed of light is that of light traveling in vacuum. This constant, known as c, is roughly 186,000 miles per second, or roughly one million times the speed of sound in air. According to Einstein’s work, matter and signals cannot travel faster than c. PVC science However, physicist William Robertson at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, along with a high school teacher, two college students and two high school students, managed to, depending on how you look at it, transmit sound pulses faster than c using little more than a plastic plumbing pipe and a computer’s sound card. ‘This experiment is truly basement science,’ Robertson told LiveScience. The key to understanding their results, reported online Jan. 2 in […]