Slower than light travel

[werk]

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/02.08/99-hau.html

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists' beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

Two years later, she brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms. Next, she restarted the stalled light without changing any of its characteristics, and sent it on its way. These highly successful experiments brought her a tenured professorship at Harvard University and a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation award to spend as she pleased.

Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.

 

[Umbran]

The reportage makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

"Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down."

This is quite thoroughly untrue! It is well known that the speed of light in a medium other than vacuum is apt to be slower. That's how plain lenses work. And "a cloud of cold atoms" counts as a medium.

There's definitely interesting stuff in the research, but the reporter is speaking untruths to play it up. That's not helping educate anyone. Grrrr.

 

[Balgus]

LOL - and the true academic implication from this experiment was the fact that she was able to transform light (energy in form of photon) into a proton ( with the same properties as the other atoms in the cloud) and move an atom, chosen at random from the first cloud and move it to another cloud at a different location and then reanimate it into light (basically taking a physical atom and changing it back to energy)

What is most interesting is that they can convert from one form to another - so if they can find a way to do the reverse- change matter to energy and change it back to matter, then you have a bonefide teleporter.

 

[Harmon]

Alter the speed of light? What-? Not possible.

 

[Jdvn1]

So creatures sensitive to light only need to fill their lairs with clouds of ultracold atoms...

 

[Angel Tarragon]

So creatures sensitive to light only need to fill their lairs with clouds of ultracold atoms...

Vampires sound off.