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that's what i always said but nobody was believing me, then there was this einstein guy and everyone believed it

Technically speaking the equation is incorrect. We now know that the speed of light isn't constant. Scientists in the laboratory have managed to slow light down considerably, and via quantum tunneling light can move faster then it would typically move. That isn't to say the equation doesn't work. Just that something thought to be a constant is not in fact a constant.

Sorry, that's not right. The speed of light in a vacuum IS a constant.

We can already slow light down by having it go through, say, air. or glass, or water. That doesn't affect the c in this formula. We can even get the part of light that's "waving" (the phase velocity) to be far in excess of c, but the rate information travels is the group velocity which has to be less than or equal to c.

Tunneling doesn't make light go faster, it just allows some photons to escape potential wells (barriers that need high energy to cross) with lower energy than you might expect, because of uncertainty in its position.

There are some fringe theories proposing that this formulation is not correct, but there is no evidence for them and afaik General Relativity is still the gold standard formula for long-scale gravity interactions and E=mc^2 is still correct for photon mass-energy equivalence.

So the equation isn't actualy "incorrect". What you're saying is that it is unreliable due to the inconsistancy of the speed of light.

The speed of light is only considered constant under vacuum, and that is the speed of light used in this equation. The c^2 is only a constant linking the relation of mass and energy, similar to say Hooke's law relating force and displacement with a constant k. So essentially it could have been anything, but it just happens to be the speed of light under vacuum squared. I believe the equation is just meant to show that mass and energy are proportional and can freely convert between each other given the right conditions (like in the seconds after big bang).

Also quantum tunneling is a phenomenon due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, I don't think its so much travelling faster than the speed of light but rather the fact that there is always an uncertainty related to the position of a moving particle, so it can sometimes be in places that classical physics would forbid (as classical physics has no uncertainty), which makes it appear as though it is travelling faster than the speed of light. Anyway thats basic quantum physics though, the concepts of it never did make sense to me. Only that it has a much more sound underlying mathematical basis.

No the equation isn't incorrect as it assumes the speed of light under vacuum, a very specific case. Speed of light does vary between different media but it remains constant under vacuum, which is proven through experimentation.

And the equation definitely does work because the electricity generated from nuclear power is done on the basis of conversion of mass to energy.

The old tricks are still the best tricks I see. A little scientific heresy goes a long way. I am of coarse happy that most of you didn't buy into the absurd, but I am a little disappointed that none of you could point out the real flaw in the argument. Falling back on definitions is a poor substitute for a genuine explanation of what exactly is going on, and why the result is counter intuitive.

The light isn't actually slowing down, and no the medium doesn't alter the properties of light. The light is moving at the same speed regardless of where it is be it a vacuum or a pool of water. The only thing that a medium does change in respect to the light is the distance that must be traveled. The light is being forced to bounce around a great many times before it comes out the other side. So it shouldn't be treated as if it is moving in a straight line between two points. It is all a trick of measurement from the perspective of an outside observer.

A more mundane explanation would be someone trying to calculate the speed of a race car by measuring the circular track, and the time it took for the car to complete the race. That is well and fine if the car only has to race one lap, but in real life we know that such races take hours to complete, because the car has to go around that small track hundreds of times. The reality isn't that the car is moving slower, but that the distance it needs to drive has become greater.

Kudos to those who saw that Quantum Tunneling had jack shit to do with faster then light. It in no way allows for a particle to move faster then the speed of light, or to disappear and reappear at a distance greater then could be traveled in General Relativity.

It's pretty cool that using Bose-Einstein condensate they've actually managed to stop light entirely.