And? Most people probably are unfamiliar with this ground breaking proposal, made by two New York high school students in the 1980s. They suggested that Einstein did not get the whole, nuanced picture, one nuance of which is the speed of light. No constant, they suggested, in the speed of light and other charged particles, only a constant maximum waveform speed. Apparently, they could not come to terms with the dual status of light in any other way, logic leaving them with particles traveling 1.6 times faster, then visible light, to many times faster depending of the type and frequency of the wave form, temperature, and the medium.
When this paper asked the teachers who made the famous second place judgement how they felt in retrospect, they had some regret yet felt they had been quite good for not entirely dismissing two kids who said they knew better than Einstein. What follows is the original encyclopedia entry which has gone largely ignored until now by the relevant associations:
Not using the term quantum tunneling, but predicting the speeds that are achieved by different frequencies of light to a high degree of precision, was the work of Jeremy S. Sloan and Gavin McKee.
Being taught in high school that light was both a particle and an energetic wave-form, they asked the obvious question, “Then is the particle not ‘driving’ down the wave?” As a car may only travel thirty miles within an hour on a curving road, its actual speed may be fifty miles-per-hour.
A need to specifically increase the potential speed of light particles was first suggested by them in 1988 with the McKee-Sloan Hypothesis, (MSH) which suggested that the actual speed of photons should be judged by the total distance travelled within the wave-form. They stated the top speed of visible light was 1.6 times 299,792,458 m/s, with increases or decreases in that speed dependent on varying wave-form frequencies, (i.e. red or blue light and other radiation) temperature, or medium.
Their theory was proved by many subsequent quantum tunneling experiments. Introduced at New York’s Dwight High School science fair, and judged by the school’s Headmaster, physics, biology, and chemistry teachers, Jeremy Sloan and Gavin McKee’s efforts were awarded second place after a young woman displaying a potato powered clock.
When asked about the incident Gavin McKee said, “I think the potentials of time dilation, faster than light processing, and the control of photons, remain an exciting field of discovery, rich in unknowns. The many other unknowns of these realities skew potential certitude, leaving us with Turing’s original deduction that our answers will be found in partnership with a mechanical quantum computing device to give scientific rigor to the perceptions of our biological quantum computing brains and the potential ability to act mechanically in the revealed conditionality.”
Jeremy S. Sloan, who declined to be interviewed for this reflection, is a senior managing director at Goldman Sachs. Gavin McKee is a writer published under many nom-de-plumes. He also does personal change work through NRV Hypnosis. Neither pursued further studies in science.
