Biography:

Günter Nimtz is a german physicist. He studied electrical engineering and graduated at the University of Vienna and became 1983 professor for physics at the University of Cologne. 2001 he gave emeritus status. At present he is still teaching and doing researches at the University of Koblenz-Landau. Working at the Physics Institute at the University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln) in Germany, he has been conducting experiments that purport to show that under certain conditions, particles may travel faster than the speed of light. (Documented in the book: "Zero Time Space: How Quantum Tunneling Broke the Light Speed Barrier")

The speed at which light travels through a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per second, is enshrined in physics lore as a universal speed limit. Nothing can travel faster than that speed, according freshman textbooks and conversation at sophisticated wine bars; Einstein's theory of relativity would crumble, theoretical physics would fall into disarray, if anything could. New experiments have demonstrated how wrong that comfortable wisdom is. Einstein's theory survives, physicists say, but the results of the experiments are so mind-bending and weird that the easily unnerved are advised--in all seriousness-not to read beyond this point.

Can light travel across space in zero time? Is there such a thing as negative energy? The strange world of quantum mechanical tunneling has the answers.Tunneling, where a particle has a statistical chance of jumping straight through an apparently impassable barrier, is an essential component of physical processes like radioactivity and nuclear fusion. Experiments dating back to the early 1990s by Nimtz, Steinberg, Chiao, and others have shown superluminal tunneling of optical photons through mirrors and of microwaves through so-called forbidden zones of waveguides.

Günter Nimtz of the University of Cologne in Germany contends that information can indeed travel faster than the seed of light, casting doubts on both causality and special relativity. In 1995, for example, his research team encoded Mozart's 40th symphony in a microwave beam traveling at 4.7 times c to a receiver.

What impact have these experiments for science, research and future technical applications? What are the latest consolidated findings and research developments?

Links and further web information:
Prof. Dr. Günter Nimtz
Tunneling Barries (Popular Science)
Günter Nimtz Wikipedia
Vitae and publications
Zero Time Space: How Quantum Tunneling Broke the Light Speed Barrier