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Posted On: 01/10/2017 4:25:07 PM
Post# of 51861
Physicists Slow Speed of Light
Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic — 38 miles an hour.
An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. When atoms become packed super-closely together at super-low temperatures and super-high vacuum, they lose their identity as individual particles and act like a single super-
atom with characteristics similar to a laser.
Such an exotic medium can be engineered to slow a light beam 20 million-fold from 186,282 miles a second to a pokey 38 miles an hour.
“In this odd state of matter, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it,” says Lene Hau, a Harvard University physicist
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/02...-of-light/
Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic — 38 miles an hour.
An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. When atoms become packed super-closely together at super-low temperatures and super-high vacuum, they lose their identity as individual particles and act like a single super-
atom with characteristics similar to a laser.
Such an exotic medium can be engineered to slow a light beam 20 million-fold from 186,282 miles a second to a pokey 38 miles an hour.
“In this odd state of matter, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it,” says Lene Hau, a Harvard University physicist
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/02...-of-light/
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