https://youtube.com/watch?v=-v_zJZNKqQc

• Number one, the Nimtz superluminal tunneling experiment. You've heard that nothing can go faster than light. Around 1994, a physicist in Germany said he'd beaten light with Mozart. Picture his lab at the University of Cologne with microwaves going into one end of a metal tube. In the middle, the tube narrows until the microwaves shouldn't get through at all. Yet Mozart's Symphony No. 40 came out the far side at 4.7 times the speed of light. But he wasn't the last scientist
  
  to build a machine to beat light. Nine more are on this list, and the last one got out of the lab. His name was Gunter Nimtz, and he didn't hedge about any of it. Here's how the machine worked. Microwaves at 8.7 GHz travel down an ordinary rectangular wave guide, basically a hollow metal pipe for radio waves. Then they hit what Nimtz called the barrier, a stretch of guide built with smaller dimensions, about 4.5 inches long. At that size, the microwaves aren't supposed to fit. Normally they'd bounce back, but a small
  
  part of the wave leaks through anyway. The same way a quantum particle can slip through a wall it doesn't have the energy to climb over. Physicists call it tunneling. And Nimtz and his colleague Horst Eickmann wanted to know how long the tunneling took. The answer was strange. Crossing the barrier took about 81 trillionths of a second. And when they made the barrier longer, going from about 1.6 inches to about 4.5, the time didn't change. Same 81 trillionths of a second. Think about what that means. If
  
  a longer trip takes the same time as a shorter one, then over the longer trip, the signal is moving faster. Stretch it far enough and it beats light. And at 4.5 inches, the group velocity of the signal came out at 4.7 times the speed of light. Group velocity is just the speed of the peak, the loudest part of the signal, the part you'd actually point to on a screen and say there it is. And that peak was crossing the barrier faster than light could have crossed the same stretch of empty air. Nimtz didn't start with music, though.
  
  Two years earlier, in 1992, he and Achim Enders had already run microwave pulses through a narrowed wave guide. The pulse that tunneled through peaked after 130 trillionths of a second. The one going through the normal path took 200. The tunneled pulse was winning, and critics answered the way physicists always answer this kind of thing. A pulse arriving early isn't information. You haven't sent a message. You've just moved a bump on a wave. So, Nimtz picked the hardest thing to argue with. He
  
  picked Mozart. His team's reasoning was blunt. Mozart is surely information. They encoded the symphony as frequency-modulated microwaves, sent it through the barrier, and played it back on the other side. Some of the signal was lost on the way, but the music came out still recognizable. Nimtz put it like this, "If that's not information, then I don't know what information is." And this was a machine, by one account, that the team put together over a weekend. A microwave generator, a length
  
  of wave guide with a squeezed section in the middle, and a receiver. Nothing you'd need a national lab for. Just a tube, a barrier, and a symphony going through it faster than it had any right to. What nobody knew at the time was that Nimtz was only getting started. In 2007, at the University of Koblenz, he and Alfons Stahlhofen built a second machine out of two glass prisms pressed into a cube about 16 in across. They fired microwaves through it, then pulled the prisms apart. Most of the microwaves
  
  bounced off the gap, but a few photons tunneled across it. And the ones that tunneled reached their detector at the same moment as the ones that bounced, no matter how wide the gap got, out to about 3 ft. They called their paper macroscopic violation of special relativity. And Nimtz told New Scientist, "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of. That's not a typo, by the way. A professor at a German university, on the record, saying Einstein's speed limit
  
  had been broken in his lab. The mainstream answer came fast. Herbert Winful at the University of Michigan said, "Those short delays should not be linked to a velocity, since evanescent waves do not propagate. In plain terms, the part of the wave inside the barrier isn't really traveling, so you can't clock it like a runner." And the bigger argument went like this. Information needs the whole pulse, not just its peak. Shape a smooth pulse just right, and the peak can show up early
  
  without anything actually outrunning light. Case closed, nothing to see. Except Nimtz never accepted that. In 2013, he and Eickmann wrote a paper called The Superluminal Tunneling Story, and they set it straight. The physics community, they wrote, had rejected the faster-than-light reading of their results. Nimtz still stood by it. And they weren't the only ones who thought the door was still open. John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, wrote about the Mozart result and proposed chaining Nimtz's
  
  barriers together with amplifiers in between, so the signal could be boosted and pushed through barrier after barrier over a long distance. He said he saw no fundamental obstacle. Picture what that would look like. A tunnel, then an amplifier to boost what made it through, then another tunnel, then another amplifier, over and over, each stage pushing the peak a little further ahead of light. If one short barrier gives you 4.7 times light speed, nobody had shown why a chain of them couldn't carry a
  
  signal a long way. So, what if Nimtz was right, and the music really did beat light through that tube? Why would the time stay the same no matter how long the barrier got? And how far could you push a signal if you stack those barriers end to end? But there was a bigger problem hanging over Nimtz, and it's the obvious one. His tunnel was 4.5 inches of metal on a bench in a lab in Cologne. So, where's the faster-than-light machine that works out in the real world, across real distance, carrying something you can actually
  
  hear? Hold on to that, because it's the question this whole list is going to answer. In 1994, nobody had built one. Long before anyone in Cologne was arguing about music though, two physicists at Princeton had tried a completely different route. They were trying to make something that can only exist above the speed of light. And to prove they'd done it, they needed one thing to glow in a space where nothing should be glowing at all.
  


• Number two, the Alvager-Chrysler tachyon experiment. Princeton University, 1968.
  
  Inside a lab, a radioactive source is blasting gamma rays into a thick shield of lead. Next to it sits a vacuum chamber pumped down to a millionth of a torr, emptier than the air on top of any mountain. Inside the chamber, two metal plates hold a strong electric field across the gap between them. And pointed at that gap is a photomultiplier, a detector so sensitive it can catch a single flash of light. The gap is empty. There's nothing in there to light up. And the two physicists who built this
  
  machine are waiting for it to glow anyway, because if it does, they've just made a particle that travels faster than light. Their names were Torsten Alvager and Michael Chrysler. And what they were chasing was the tachyon, a particle that, if it exists, can never slow down to the speed of light. It lives entirely on the other side of the barrier. Their paper didn't bother with careful wording. It was called "Quest for Faster-Than-Light Particles", published in Physical Review that year. Here's why
  
  serious physicists thought this was worth building. In 1962, three physicists named Bilaniuk, Deshpande, and Sudarshan pointed out something odd about Einstein's equations. They say you can't speed a normal particle up to light speed, but they don't actually forbid a particle that was born going faster than light in the first place. In 1967, Gerald Feinberg pushed the same argument further, and by then the particle had a name, the tachyon. If relativity allows it, the thinking went, then maybe nature
  
  makes it. And if nature makes it, maybe we can, too. So, Alvager and Chrysler designed a machine to manufacture them. The plan went like this, fire high-energy gamma rays into lead. If tachyons exist, some of that energy should turn into pairs of them born inside the shield. The charged ones would come flying out into the vacuum chamber faster than light from the moment they exist. But, here's the clever part. How do you catch something faster than light? You make it give itself away. A charged particle moving faster than
  
  light through a material throws off a shockwave of blue light, a little like the sonic boom from a jet. It's called Cherenkov radiation. And according to the theory, a charged tachyon is always going faster than light, even in a perfect vacuum. So, it should glow even in empty space. That's what the plates and the photomultiplier were for. In a perfect vacuum, ordinary particles don't glow at all. There's nothing for them to push against. So, any flash in that empty gap would be almost impossible to explain
  
  any other way. The electric field would keep feeding the tachyon energy, and the tachyon would keep shedding it as light. Empty space lighting up would be the fingerprint. They ran it. And the gap stayed dark. Their results set an upper limit of less than three microbarns on tachyon production in lead at gamma ray energies of 0.8 million electron volts. Physics Today ran it with a headline that didn't soften anything. Princetonians fail to find faster-than-light particles. So, yeah, not great. But, buried in that same
  
  article was a line that mattered more. Chrysler is trying to improve his experiment. Now, Alvager could have stopped there. He didn't. Two years later, in 1970, at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, he and Edward Herring built the machine again, bigger. The new version used a five curie cobalt 60 source, a vacuum chamber charged to 18,000 volts, and two RCA photo multipliers wired to fire only when both saw a flash at the same instant, so stray noise couldn't fool them. They worked out that every single tachyon
  
  passing through should throw off about 1,000 photons. So, even one crossing the gap should have set off both photo multipliers. Think about what that means for the detector. Two photo multipliers, both waiting in the dark, and a single tachyon would light them both up at once, like a camera flash. They ran the machine for 36 hours straight, a day and a half of watching an empty chamber for a burst of light. They counted fewer than 10 candidate events, not enough to call a discovery. But, the limit got tighter, much
  
  tighter, down to about 1.4 * 10 ^ -36 square inches. Their write-up ended on one line. We will continue these experiments. The mainstream conclusion writes itself. Two machines, two runs, no tachyons. If faster than light particles existed and could be made in lead, these detectors should have lit up, and they didn't. Tachyons slipped back into the textbooks as a mathematical curiosity, and the field moved on. The particle that relativity seemed to allow got filed away as something nature just doesn't
  
  bother to make. But, look at what the machines actually tested. One kind of source at a couple of energy ranges in one material, looking for one specific signal. A limit only says not this way, not at this energy, not this often. A tachyon made more rarely than the machine could count, or made by something other than gamma rays hitting lead, would slip straight past it, and the builders knew that. That's why they kept saying they'd be back. What if the particle was real, and the machine was
  
  just looking in the wrong place? Why would relativity leave the door open for something nature never uses? And if somebody did build a better tachyon catcher, what would they need to look for next? Alvager and Chrysler thought the only way past light was exotic physics, a brand new particle born on the far side of the barrier. Their critics agreed with them on that much, at least. You'd need something nobody had ever seen. But a physicist in Eastern Canada did it with something you can buy off a spool. Ordinary coaxial
  
  cable, the stuff behind your television. And the trick that made it work was the one thing every electrical engineer on the planet spends their career trying to get rid of.
  


• Number three, the Moncton coaxial photonic crystal. Picture about 394 ft of coaxial cable, the same kind of round black cable that used to run into the back of your television. It's been cut into sections about 16 ft long and spliced back together end to end, and the sections don't match. One kind, then a different kind, then the first kind
  
  again, over and over. An electrical pulse goes in one end, and in a band of frequencies right around 10 MHz, that pulse comes out the other end at about three times the speed of light. This was the Universite de Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, and the machine belonged to Alain Hache and Louis Poirier. They published it in Applied Physics Letters in January 2002, and the reaction was instant. Physics World ran it under a headline that sounded more like sports than physics. Electrical pulses break light speed record. Now, to
  
  see why this landed so hard, you need one number. Signals in an ordinary coaxial cable don't move at light speed. They move at about 2/3 of it. The plastic inside the cable slows them down. So, Hache's cable was beating normal cable by a factor of more than four, and beating light in a vacuum while it was at it, using parts you could buy off a spool. And the trick behind it was reflections. Every time a signal hits a point where one kind of cable meets another, part of it bounces back. Engineers call that an
  
  impedance mismatch, and it's one of the things they fight hardest to get rid of because reflections scramble signals and waste power. Hatch built his entire machine out of them. About two dozen mismatches spaced so the reflections stacked up and worked together like a filter. They tested pulses all the way from 5 to 15 MHz to find where the effect kicked in. Inside that filter's blocked band, roughly 9 to 11 MHz, the peak of the pulse got pushed forward and came out ahead of where light alone
  
  would have put it. Hatch said it plainly, "Oddly, the reason no one has done this before is that we are using what most people are trying to avoid." And then he added this, "But as far as superluminal propagation goes, this is the key. If you're enjoying this, subscribe because the machines only get stranger from here." And H wasn't alone for long. That same year, at Middle Tennessee State University, Jeremy Munday and W. M. Robertson built their own version. 17 sections of cable, about
  
  392 ft in total. The equipment driving it was almost comically ordinary. Two function generators and an oscilloscope, the kind of gear sitting in the back of nearly any physics department. And their result went further than Monkton's. The group velocity went negative, -1.2 times the speed of light. In plain terms, the peak of the pulse came out of the far end of the cable before the peak of the input had even gone in. On the oscilloscope, that looks like a cable that knows what's coming. Two traces on one screen,
  
  one for the pulse going in and one for the pulse coming out. And the one coming out, from nearly 400 ft of cable away, peaks first. You can turn the frequency knob on the function generator and watch it happen. The mainstream reading is the same one you'll hear again and again on this list. The builders themselves said their cable does not break any laws of physics. Every individual frequency inside that pulse still travels slower than light. It's the way they add up at the far end that pushes the peak forward. Nothing
  
  that carries a message, the argument goes, ever outruns light, just the bump. But think about how far this has come. Nimtz's barrier was 4.5 inches long. These cables were nearly 400 feet, longer than a football field. Same effect, about a thousand times the distance, and built from hardware store parts. If a cable can push a pulse ahead of light over the length of a football field, what happens over a mile? Why does every one of these machines work only inside a narrow band of frequencies? And who decided that a
  
  pulse arriving early isn't a message when the people watching it on an oscilloscope can see it show up first? There's still the catch from the Cologne story, though. 400 feet is long, but the whole thing was coiled up on a lab bench inside a building. In the West, all of this was a curiosity tucked into journal pages. But on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Ministry of Defense had already been paying for years for a generator its builder said could send signals a billion times faster than
  
  light. And what the military wanted that machine to reach was not a scientific question at all.
  


• Number four, the Akimov generator, Moscow, 1986. At a state research institute that works on communication systems, a generator switches on. It isn't a radio. According to the people who built it, it isn't sending radio waves at all. Somewhere out across the city, about 13.7 miles away, a receiver is listening for it. And the man in charge believed the signal crossing that distance was moving
  
  at least a billion times faster than light. His name was Anatoly Akimov, and this wasn't a basement project. Akimov spent his whole career inside Moscow's radio and communications institutes. From 1977 to 1983, he was at the Moscow Scientific Research Institute of Radio. From 1983 to 1987, the Research Institute for Communication Systems and Control, which is where those 1986 communication experiments ran. And from 1987 to 1991, he headed a department at NIIMP, the Research Institute of Microdevices,
  
  where the generators themselves were built. A later review by the researcher Serge Kernbach put it like this. Almost all experiments in the late '80s and early '90s within state programs were performed with so-called small and large Akimov's generator. So, what was the machine supposed to do? Akimov's idea was that spin, the property that makes particles behave like tiny spinning tops, creates its own kind of field. He and the theorist Gennady Shipov called it a torsion field. And in Akimov's own account,
  
  these fields can be generated, detected, switched on and off, such as for communication purposes, and travel at velocities at least as high as 10 to the ninth times the speed of light. That's a one with nine zeros after it. A message from Moscow to the moon at that speed wouldn't take a second. It wouldn't take a millionth of a second. Then there's what happened behind closed doors. Because before 1990, nobody outside the program even called it torsion. Kernbach found that the word only appears around
  
  1990 or 1991. Before that, inside the institutes, it was just called the spin concept. And in 1987, a proposal went to the Soviet Ministry of Defense. According to one account, the state allocated 500 million rubles. Kernbach's figure is smaller, but still serious. About 23 million rubles spent by the Ministry of Defense between 1986 and 1989, with work later spread across about 20 subcontracting organizations. 20 separate organizations all working on a machine that officially didn't have a name until 1990.
  
  One eccentric scientist in a back room doesn't need 20 organizations behind him. A state program does. If you're wondering how a faster-than-light radio gets that kind of money, so is everyone else. But look at the claimed uses and it starts to make sense. A signal that ignores distance, that passes straight through matter, could reach things ordinary radio can't. Objects in space, objects deep underground, objects underwater, where ordinary radio struggles to reach. And because it didn't travel like radio, the claim
  
  went, it couldn't be jammed. For a military in the middle of the Cold War, a link like that would be worth paying for, even on a long shot. Picture a submarine deep under the ice that could get orders instantly, or a satellite that could be reached through the whole planet instead of waiting for it to come over the horizon. That was the promise sitting on the table in 1987. In 1991, the physicist Eugene Alexandrov came out against the group and denounced the whole program. That should have been the end of it. It
  
  wasn't. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the money kept coming. The Russian Ministry of Science funded the work from 1992 to 1995. The Ministry of Defense picked it up again from 1996 to 1997. That's more than 10 years of state funding through the fall of an entire country for a machine one of the country's own physicists had publicly denounced. And there's a coda. In 2008, a torsion-based reactionless drive flew into orbit on a satellite called Yubileiny. The Russian academician Kruglyakov said afterward
  
  that it had not changed the satellite's orbit by even a micron. The mainstream verdict is about as harsh as it gets. Torsion fields, it says, are pseudoscience. The 1986 test has no published speed measurement, and the billion times light figure comes from the people selling the idea. The case gets filed next to perpetual motion and forgotten. But that verdict skips over the part that should bother you. Two governments, the Soviet Union and then Russia, kept paying for this for more than a decade. Defense ministries don't
  
  usually keep writing checks for something that never does anything. What did those generators do in the tests nobody published? Why did the funding survive a public denunciation and the collapse of the country paying for it? And if the signal really crossed 13.7 mi of Moscow, why is there no paper trail for anyone to check? That's the problem with Akimov's machine. 13 mi is real distance, finally out in a real city. But it lives in reports nobody outside the program could ever examine. And in
  
  2000, a corporate lab in New Jersey went the opposite way. They put their number in nature, the most famous science journal in the world, for anyone to check. Their pulse of light left a little glass cell before it had finished going in. And by the time the back end of it entered, the front had already gotten so far past the cell that the distance sounds like a typo.
  


• Number five. The NEC gain-assisted superluminal light experiment. Picture a little glass cell about 2.4 in long filled with cesium
  
  gas. Two lasers in a magnetic field have been tuned on it to set the atoms up in a very particular way and a third laser is shining straight through it. Now a pulse of light about 3.7 millionths of a second long is fired into that cell. Light crossing 2.4 in of empty space would need about 0.2 billionths of a second. This pulse comes out the far side 62 billionths of a second early. Early as in before it should have even reached the cell. To put that in perspective, the whole crossing should have taken 0.2 billionths of a second
  
  and the pulse beat that by 62 billionths. That pulse came out early by hundreds of times the length of the entire trip. This was the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, a corporate research lab. The three physicists were Lijun Wang, Alexander Kuzmich, and Artur Dogariu. And on July 20th, 2000, they published it in Nature under a title that said exactly what they'd done: gain-assisted superluminal light propagation. Superluminal as in faster than light. The number they reported was 310. The pulse had gone
  
  through that cell at 310 times the speed of light. Physics World's headline was "Laser smashes light speed record." And when the Associated Press asked Wang about it, he didn't hide behind careful language. He said their experiment does show that the generally held misconception that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light is wrong. I mean, think about that for a second. A physicist at a major corporate lab with a paper in Nature calling the most famous rule in physics a misconception.
  
  Here's how the cell worked. Normally, when light passes through a gas, it slows down. That's ordinary. But Wang's team prepared the cesium atoms so they would feed energy into the light instead of soaking it up, a setup physicists call gain. Tuned just right, something flips and the gas pushes the pulse's peak forward instead of slowing it down. And because they tuned it so carefully, the pulse came out the other end with essentially the same shape it went in with. That mattered because earlier
  
  faster-than-light claims had been knocked down for exactly this reason. Critics would say the pulse got so mangled that you couldn't tell what had arrived when. This one came out looking like itself. Same width, same height, same shape, just early. If you lined up the pulse going in and the pulse coming out on the same screen, they'd look like twins except one of them got there first. What comes next is the part that still doesn't make sense. The AP worked out what those numbers meant in plain
  
  terms. By the time the back end of that light pulse had finished entering the cell, the front of the pulse had already come out the far side and traveled about 60 ft beyond it. 60 ft past the exit of a 2.4 in cell before the pulse was even all the way in. The output was leaving before the input had finished arriving. The reaction from other physicists tells you how big this was. Raymond Chiao at Berkeley said this is a breakthrough in the sense that people have thought that was impossible. Ephraim Steinberg in
  
  Toronto put the strangeness into one question. How did they manage to produce light that looks exactly like something that didn't get there yet? And here's the twist in the backstory. Just a year before, the same NEC lab had gone the opposite direction. They'd slowed light down to about 38 miles an hour, slower than a car on a highway. A year later, that same lab had it running at 310 times its own speed limit. Now, there's a careful line, Wang added, and the mainstream leans on it hard. This effect
  
  cannot be used to send information back in time. And in 2003, a team at Duke University went after the obvious question. They put actual ones and zeros on a fast light pulse and measured when the information arrived. Their answer was that the information came through somewhat slower than light. So the peak could race ahead, but the actual ones and zeros, the part that makes it a message, showed up behind schedule. The mainstream conclusion was set from then on. Whatever the peak does, the message itself never beats light. But
  
  look closely at what was actually tested. Duke measured one setup with one kind of gas, encoding data in one particular way. Wang's pulse kept its shape and came out 62 billionths of a second early in a cell built for exactly that purpose. The whole fight is over what that number is allowed to mean. So what if the line between a pulse and a message is thinner than the textbooks admit? Why does a pulse that looks identical going in and coming out not count as the same thing arriving? And if the same lab could make light crawl one
  
  year and race the next, who says 310 is the ceiling? Here's the catch though, all of it happened inside a glass cell you could hold between two fingers. A record, absolutely, but still a few inches of gas in a lab. Wang beat light inside a jar of gas. A dozen years later, NASA built a machine to bend the space around a ship so the ship would never have to break the limit in the first place. And the trip they had in mind would take Voyager 1 about 75,000 years.
  


• Number six. The NASA White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer.
  
  Houston, Texas, inside NASA's Johnson Space Center. A helium-neon laser is bolted onto a small table along with a beam splitter and a black and white camera, the kind you could buy from a catalog. The laser beam is split in two and the two halves travel separate paths before meeting again at the camera. In the path of one of them sits a small ring about 0.4 inches across. Inside that ring are four ceramic capacitors made of barium titanate charged to 23,000 volts.
  
  And the engineers watching that camera are waiting for one thing. A tiny shift between the two beams that would mean the space inside the ring had just been warped. This was Eagleworks, NASA's Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory. The man running it was Harold White who everybody called Sonny, working with a retired NASA engineer named Richard and they weren't being shy about what they were building. In their own words, the team had initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and
  
  detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble. A warp bubble means a pocket of bent space, the kind of thing every science fiction fan has pictured carrying a starship. NASA's own slides spelled out the goal, hyperfast interstellar travel. Cross any given cosmic distance in an arbitrarily short period of time. The plots on those slides showed a bubble about 33 ft across moving at an effective speed of 10 times the speed of light. To get why that number matters, you need the alternative. The same NASA slides
  
  compared it with Voyager 1, the fastest thing we've ever sent out of the solar system. To reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, Voyager would need about 75,000 years. White's pitch was a trip to Alpha Centauri in about 2 weeks as measured by clocks back on Earth. 75,000 years against 2 weeks. That's the gap between every rocket humans have ever built and the thing this little ring on a table in Houston was trying to show was possible. The warp drive idea itself wasn't new. The trouble was
  
  always the cost. Earlier calculations said you'd need exotic energy equal to the mass of the planet Jupiter just to make one work. White went back through the math and reworked the design. His version brought that requirement down to roughly 1,100 lbs from the mass of a planet to about the weight of a small car. Suddenly, the question was whether you could detect even a tiny bit of the effect on a lab bench. That's what the interferometer was for. White put the scale into one sentence. We're perturbing space-time
  
  one part in 10 million, a very tiny amount. If the charged ring warped space around it even that little, one of the laser beams would travel a slightly different path and the camera would see the two beams fall out of step. It's a bit like two runners who start together and run identical laps. If one of them crosses the finish a hair behind the other, you know something on their lane was different. Here, the only thing that could make the lane different was the space itself. His 2011 paper called warp
  
  field mechanics 101 was blunt about how close he thought they were. The tools necessary to detect a modest instance of the phenomenon are near at hand and White had his own way of putting the rules. "We You to go really fast," he said, while observing the 11th commandment, "Thou shall not exceed the speed of light." Locally, the ship inside the bubble never breaks the limit. It's space itself doing the moving. So, the ship stays legal and still beats light across the distance, which,
  
  looking back, was either incredibly brave or incredibly reckless. They took it seriously enough to move it. In January 2013, the interferometer was relocated to a seismically isolated facility at Johnson that had originally been built for the Apollo program. A lab built to test hardware for the moon landings, now holding a warp drive experiment. Because at one part in 10 million, even the building itself shaking is enough to swamp the signal. But the budget never matched the ambition. NASA's Applewhite, asked about it, put
  
  it like this. He's not funded at a very high level. White himself said warp travel still hadn't had its Chicago pile, one moment, a reference to the first nuclear reactor, the experiment that turned atomic into a working machine. The interferometer was meant to be that moment for warp drive. The mainstream conclusion is cold. The results were inconclusive. No confirmed warp bubble. The physicist Ken Olum summed up the skeptics view in one line. "I don't think any normal understanding of
  
  physics predicts he's going to see anything." But here's what that verdict leaves standing. NASA, the agency that put people on the moon, gave a team a lab, a room built for Apollo, and its name on the slides, for a machine whose only purpose was to bend space and beat light. Inconclusive means the instrument couldn't say either way. What if the bubble was there, and one part in 10 million was simply too small for a catalog camera to catch? How much more sensitive would the next machine need to
  
  be? And why would NASA keep a warp drive rig running in an Apollo building if nobody inside thought anything was there? Notice where the bubble lived, though. On a table in a ring smaller than a fingertip inside a building in Houston. The ironic part is that NASA was trying to make light stop being the limit, and 7 years before that rig went into the Apollo building, a team at the University of Rochester had already made light do something far stranger than going fast. They watched a pulse inside a fiber, and the direction
  
  its peak was traveling broke every instinct you have about how light should move.
  


• Number seven, the Rochester backwards pulse propagation experiment. A laser pulse is split into two identical halves. One half travels along an ordinary path as a reference, so the team knows exactly when a normal pulse would arrive. The other half goes into a length of optical fiber that has been laced with a rare element called erbium, and the team watching the far end of that fiber sees it light up before the peak of the pulse has even entered the
  
  fiber at the near end. This was the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester in New York in 2006, and the lab belonged to Robert Boyd. Working with him were George Gering and Aaron Schweinsberg, and two undergraduates, Christopher Barcy from Manhattan College, and Natalie Kostinski from the University of Michigan. College students on a paper in Science. Boyd described the result in one sentence that sounds like it shouldn't be possible. We sent a pulse through an optical fiber, and
  
  before its peak even entered the fiber, it was exiting the other end. Put simply, the light came out before it went in, and that wasn't even the strangest thing they saw. The team wanted to know what the pulse was doing inside the fiber while all this was happening. You can't put a camera inside a strand of glass, so they did something almost brutally simple. They cut the fiber shorter, a few inches at a time, and measured the pulse again after every cut. Cut, measure, cut, measure back
  
  along the fiber. Every cut gave them a snapshot of where the peak was at that point inside the glass. Line the snapshots up in order, and you get something like a flipbook of a pulse moving through a fiber. And when they put the measurements together, they saw it. Inside the fiber, the peak of the pulse was traveling backwards. While the light going in moved forward, the peak was running the other way, from the far end back toward the start to meet it. Their paper said it right in the title, "Observation of backwards
  
  pulse propagation through a medium with a negative group velocity." Live Science's headline was, "Light travels backward and faster than light." If that's the kind of thing you want more of, subscribe, because there are three machines left, and they get even harder to believe. While all of this was happening, fast light was turning into its own field. Princeton had already pushed light to 310 times its speed in a cesium cell. Cables in Canada and Tennessee were beating light with reflections, and
  
  Boyd's lab had a history of going both directions. Before this, he'd slowed light down until it was moving, in his own words, "slower than an airplane." Now he'd flipped it, pushed it past light speed, and turned it around. And Boyd was the first to admit how strange it was. "Theory predicted that we could send light backwards," he said, "but nobody knew if the theory would hold up." He said he'd had some of the world's experts scratching their heads over this
  
  one. And then he added a line you don't often hear from a physicist. "I know this all sounds weird, but this is the way the world works." The trick was in the erbium. Like the cesium in Princeton, the erbium atoms in that fiber were set up so they changed how the pulse moved through them. In a normal material, a pulse slows down. In this one, the way its different frequencies added up flipped around, so the peak raced ahead at the exit and ran backwards inside. Physicists call that a
  
  negative group velocity. It's the same family of effect as the NEC cell, just pushed so hard that the direction itself turned around. The mainstream verdict is one Boyd gave himself. "As with all fast light experiments," he said, "No information is truly moving faster than light. The leading edge of the pulse, the very first sliver of it, still obeys the limit. The peak is just a shape riding on top of it. But, look at what that answer asks you to accept. A peak that leaves the fiber before it enters
  
  and runs backwards while the light goes forward, and none of it counts. What if the shape of a pulse is carrying more than physicists give it credit for? Why does nature allow light to run backwards inside a fiber at all if nothing useful can ever come of it? And if a team that included two undergraduates could build this in a university lab, how far could someone push it with a real budget? There's still a pattern here, though. Cesium cell, erbium fiber, coaxial cable, microwave tube. Every one of them
  
  needed something built to carry the effect, and every one of them was carrying some form of light or radio. For a while, that seemed like the rule. Faster-than-light meant light or something like it. That didn't last. Because in Tennessee, a physics professor and three high school students built a faster-than-light machine out of parts you can find in the plumbing aisle of a hardware store. And the thing traveling through it wasn't light at all.
  


• Number eight. The MTSU acoustic loop filter.
  Picture about 26 ft of 3/4 in PVC pipe, the white plastic kind under your sink. At one end, there's a speaker. At the other end, there's a microphone. Halfway along, the pipe splits into a loop, one side about 6 in long, and the other about 26 in. joined back together with ordinary right angle and T fittings from a hardware store. The speaker plays a short, high-pitched beep at 2,414 Hz, and the microphone hears the peak of that beep 0.0024 seconds early, before the peak had even gone into the loop. This was Middle
  
  Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, and the team was a mix you don't usually see on a physics paper. The professor, W. M. Robertson, with J. Papa Fotis and P. Flanagan and three high school students, J. Cathay and B. Cathay from Siegel High School and C. Klaus from Blackman High School. Robertson was the same physicist whose lab had already pushed electrical pulses through 392 feet of cable faster than light back in number three. This time they skipped the electricity entirely. No cables, no generators driving pulses
  
  down a wire, just a speaker, a microphone, and a pipe you could carry under one arm. The paper came out in Applied Physics Letters on January 2nd, 2007 under a title that sounds like a joke until you read it, Sound Beyond the Speed of Light. And the first line of their abstract meant it. We demonstrate experimentally the transmission of audio frequency acoustic pulses with group velocities that exceed the speed of light. Sound, not light, not radio, not microwaves. Sound, which normally moves through air at a pace about a million
  
  times slower than light, and a group of teenagers were part of the team that pushed it past the limit. Here's how it worked. When the sound wave reaches the split, it divides and travels around both sides of the loop. Because one side is so much longer than the other, about 6 inches against about 26, the two halves come back together out of step. One half has taken the short way around and the other has taken the long way. So, when they meet, their peaks and dips don't line up anymore. At certain frequencies, they
  
  cancel each other and the loop acts like a filter. Inside that filter's blocked band, the same thing that happened in the Canadian cable happens here. The peak of the pulse gets pushed forward. At 2,414 hertz, the result was a group velocity of about minus 116 miles an hour. That minus sign is the whole story. It means the peak came out of the loop before it went in. The team's own line puts the scale in perspective. Superluminal propagation is realized despite almost six orders of magnitude
  
  difference between the speeds of sound and light. In plain terms, sound starts about a million times behind light in the race, and the pipe still let its peak finish ahead. The rig itself was almost embarrassingly simple. An Alesis Monitor One speaker, a condenser microphone, and a computer sound card running MATLAB to make the beeps and record them. The National Science Foundation paid for it through a grant program called STEP. Few people outside the field have ever heard of this experiment, but it might be the cheapest
  
  faster-than-light machine ever published. And then there's the line from the paper that's genuinely eerie. "The effect," they wrote, "is likely a ubiquitous but imperceptible phenomenon in the everyday world." Ubiquitous, as in everywhere. In the rooms you sit in, where sound bounces off walls and splits and recombines, pieces of what you hear could be doing this right now, and you'd never notice. Every hallway and every stairwell is full of sound taking a short path and a long path at the same
  
  time. The team built their loop on purpose, but the same split happens on its own whenever sound has two ways to reach your ear. The mainstream verdict, written by the authors themselves, is the same one that followed every machine on this list. "All of these superluminal phenomena do not violate special relativity or causality," they wrote. "The speed of information transmission is subluminal, below light." But think about what it means that this keeps happening. Microwaves in Cologne,
  
  electrical pulses in Canada, light in Princeton and Rochester, now sound in a plastic pipe in Tennessee. If pushing a peak past the speed limit is this easy to do with this many kinds of waves, why does the official answer always stop at the same place? What if the information rule is just the place where everybody agreed to stop looking? And if it's happening in ordinary rooms already, what are we hearing early that we never noticed? But the official story still had one fallback. Every one of these
  
  effects needed a pipe, a cable, a fiber, or a gas to happen inside. Take away the material and, the argument went, the trick has nothing to work with. Then a fusion lab in Rochester built a laser where the faster-than-light part is a spot of light steered by the design of the laser itself with no pipe or cable involved. They had to invent a whole new kind of camera just to film it. And the top speed they clocked makes every machine before it looks slow.
  


• Number nine, the Rochester flying focus.
  
  Picture a single spot of intense laser light, a bright point where the beam is focused hardest. Now picture that spot sliding along a short track less than a fifth of an inch long. It's moving at 39 times the speed of light. And the only reason anyone knows that is because a team in Rochester, New York, built a camera that takes pictures a trillionth of a second apart just to film it happening. This was the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, one of the major laser labs in the United States, funded by the
  
  Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences. The group belonged to Dustin Frula, and in 2018 they published the machine in Nature Photonics, then presented it that November at the American Physical Society's Plasma Physics Meeting in Portland, Oregon. R&D World's headline read, "Lasers travel faster than speed of light. Here's how they did it." A normal lens focuses all the colors in a beam of light at roughly the same spot. Frula's team used a special kind of lens that does the
  
  opposite on purpose. It focuses each color at a different distance. Red here, a little further for orange, further again for yellow, all the way down the line. Then they fired a laser pulse that was chirped, meaning its colors don't arrive all at once. They arrive in order, one after another, in a timed sweep. So now you have a lens that puts each color in a different place and a pulse that delivers each color at a different time. A different place and a different time for every color in the
  
  beam. Put those two things together and something wild happens. As each color arrives, it comes into focus at its own spot. So, the bright point where everything is focused hardest starts to move. And because the team controls both the lens and the timing of the colors, they control how fast that bright point moves. In their own words, the spot can propagate at any velocity, even faster than the speed of light. And no, I'm not making that up. Any velocity. They measured it moving at 39 times
  
  light speed. They measured it crawling forward. They even measured it running backwards at minus 0.09 times light speed. The design was built to go as high as 50 times the speed of light. It works like a dial. Set the speed you want, including speeds that are supposed to be impossible, and the machine delivers it. That was only round one. Filming it was the harder problem. Froula explained what they had to build to prove it. This required a new diagnostic that could make a movie with frames separated by a trillionth of
  
  a second. And when they ran that camera, the spot didn't fade as it raced along. Its peak brightness stayed nearly constant over a distance of about 0.18 inches, which is about 100 times further than a normal focus can hold its strength. Froula put the payoff like this. It allows us to generate high intensities over hundreds of times the distance than we could before, and at any speed. That's the part that makes this different from almost everything else on this list. It's a tool. Fusion
  
  researchers want it for things called photon accelerators and laser wakefield accelerators, machines that use light to push particles to huge energies. To them, a faster-than-light spot of light is a working part. Being able to set the speed of the brightest point in a laser beam and hold it steady over 100 times the usual distance is the kind of control that lets you build a whole new class of machine around it. The mainstream verdict is careful, as always. What moves faster than light is the bright spot, not the light itself.
  
  Each photon in that beam is still traveling at light speed or slower. It's the place where they happen to be focused that sweeps along faster, a bit like a wave of people standing up in a stadium. The wave can move around the stadium faster than anyone in it could run. But look at what the builders actually said and actually did. They designed a machine whose whole purpose was to move a focus of intense light at whatever speed they chose, and they chose speeds past light, and they kept the energy
  
  concentrated while it did it. What if the next version holds that focus not for a fifth of an inch, but for feet? Why does the universe let you move a spot of concentrated energy at 39 times light speed if the speed limit is supposed to be absolute? And how long until something built this way gets pointed out into the world instead of down a lab track? Still, the problem from Cologne hangs over this one, too. The spot crossed less than a fifth of an inch inside a lab in Rochester. The last machine on this list got off the bench.
  
  It was taken out to an airport runway in the English countryside and switched on in the open air. Later versions were tested over a distance of 47 mi, and the most important thing about them is what one of them carried.
  


• Number 10, the Los Alamos light slinger, Turweston Aerodrome near Northampton, England.
  
  A runway about 3,000 ft long out in the countryside. Set up on it is a machine that looks nothing like an ordinary antenna. A curved strip of aluminum ceramic about 2 in wide bent into an arc
  
  with a radius of about 33 ft sitting on a metal ground plate. Along that strip are 41 electrodes, and every one of them has its own amplifier. The amplifiers fire in a precise sequence, one after the next, so that a pattern of electric current sweeps along the curve, and that pattern is moving at twice the speed of light. The team behind it came from Oxford, Cambridge, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Arzhang Ardavan and W. Hayes at Oxford, John Singleton at Los Alamos, Houshang
  
  Ardavan at Cambridge, and the engineers J. Fopma and D. Halliday from Oxford Central Electronics Workshop. Their 2004 paper described what they'd built in plain language. An oscillating accelerated superluminal polarization current. Here's how it works. Inside the ceramic strip, each electrode nudges the materials electric charges slightly out of place. Fire the electrodes one after another fast enough and that disturbance runs along the strip like a wave of falling dominoes. No single charge has
  
  to move fast but the pattern can move as fast as the electronics can fire. The team ran it at 1.064 times the speed of light. Then 1.25, then 2.0, and as a check, they also ran it at 0.875, just under light speed, so they could compare what changed when the current crossed the barrier. Below light, then just above it, then a quarter faster, then double. Same machine, same runway, with the only thing changing being how fast the pattern swept along the curve. What came out of it was unusual. The machine was driven at about 552 MHz
  
  in the same broad range as the radio signals all around you every day. But the beam that came off it was tight, only about 4 to 5 angstroms wide, the kind of narrow beam you'd want if you were trying to put a signal exactly where you aimed it. The original reason for building it was to copy something in space, pulsars, the spinning dead stars that sweep beams of radio across the sky and the violent way they throw out their signals. So, the team built a working model of a pulsar on a runway. But Singleton wasn't
  
  done with it. He took the idea back to Los Alamos, and the machine got a new name, Light Slinger. The lab describes them as polarization currents animated within a dielectric to faster-than-light speeds, which sling tightly focused packets of radio waves. Singleton said it simply, "We have been developing Light Slingers at Los Alamos for more than 15 years." In 2022, the design won an R&D 100 Award, and the United States patents on it carry a title that would have made Nymeth smile, Superluminal
  
  Antenna. The mainstream verdict is the same careful line, and Los Alamos says it itself, "The radio waves that come off the antenna still travel at light speed. It's the current pattern inside the ceramic that runs faster than light." The machine doesn't break the limit, the argument goes, "It just has a part inside it that does." But, that's exactly what every builder on this list was reaching for, a part that runs faster than light, built on purpose, doing a job. This one does it inside a
  
  patented antenna. Back in Cologne, the obvious problem with Nymeth's music was that it only crossed 4.5 in of metal on a lab bench. Where was the faster-than-light machine that works out in the real world, across real distance, carrying something you can actually hear? Every machine since then fell short, each in its own way. The cables stayed coiled in buildings. The torsion test left no paper trail. NASA's warp bubble never left its table. The laser spot crossed a fifth of an inch. The
  
  Light Slinger left the lab. Los Alamos prototypes were tested over a distance of about 47 mi. Three of them were independently checked by a United States telecom company, not a physics department. And one of them carried a high-fidelity transmission of music, a faster-than-light current out in the real world, across nearly 50 mi, sending music somebody could actually listen to. A symphony going through a 4.5 in tunnel in Cologne, stuck in a lab, except now the music is riding on a faster-than-light current out across 47
  
  mi of open country. From a gamma source in Princeton to a torsion generator in Moscow, from a warp ring in Houston to a plumbing pipe in Tennessee, scientists have spent more than 50 years building machines that push something past the speed of light. Every time, the official answer said it doesn't count. And every time, somebody went and built the next one anyway. Tell me where you're watching from and subscribe for more.
  

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