What ever happened with NEC's experiment that exceeded the speed of light?

[Glenn]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/faster_than_c_000719.html

Quote from the article... "NEC’s Lijun Wang says he created an experiment in which a light beam raced through a gas-filled chamber so quickly, it exceeded the speed of light by a factor of 300. "


Does anyone know what ever happened with this. If such a fantastic claim were true, I am sure I would have heard about it. I am curious though how this was eventually handled by the scientific community.


Thanks,
Glenn

 

[Cosmo16]

I was just re-reading that article a couple of minutes ago. I was wondering the same thing.

 

[Garth]

Confused? You’re not alone. In fact, even scientists who are familiar with this area of study are unsure about the details of Wang’s experiment. And many scientists said the experiment’s results are still open to interpretation.

William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University argued that several specific problems exist with the experiment, including the fact that pulses get distorted when passed through any media other than a vacuum, or empty space. In addition, he said Wang and his colleagues performed the experiment in a way that doesn’t tell the whole story, and that it can be interpreted incorrectly. "This is anything but dramatic," said Happer. "If you look at the data, there’s essentially no evidence that [the beam] is going faster than the speed of light."

I think that says it all. Shine a laser on the Moon and move it around, you can easily make the beam pattern move faster than light; I think the same must apply to Wang's pulses.

Garth