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Harvard Physicists Make Light Dance

Posted by kdawson on from the not-so-fast dept.

tetrikphimvin and others clued us to the latest work by Harvard's Lene Vestergaard Hau, being published today in the journal Nature. The NYTimes has a good layman's overview of how Hau's team encoded a light beam in a clump of atoms and later reconstituted it elsewhere. The Harvard Gazette offers additional details, a photo, and video links.

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So, if you walk next to stopped light... by CaffeineAddict2001 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Relativity is concerned with the speed of light in a vacuum. Anytime light passes through a substance it is slowed down. It's not much different than walking past a cup of water.

  2. Re:acid by spun · · Score: 4, Informative

    Acid is for wimps. If you really want to see light dance, you want N,N-DMT or 5MeO-DMT. There is also no way to stop it from utterly demolishing your ego, so ego based people should NOT try it.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  3. Frame of reference by DAtkins · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hee hee... that's funny, despite the fact that it's wrong.

    Frame of reference is an idea that actually had it's beginnings in Einstein's work. The idea being, can a person determine the absolute velocity of [something]. For example, from the frame of reference of the earth, my car goes 65 miles per hour. From the frame of reference of the sun, my car goes 2.9 km/s (because the earth moves that fast around the sun.

    Why is this important? Well, Einstein used this to question why the speed of light seemed constant despite your frame of reference. On a ball of rock orbiting the sun at 2.9 km/s, the speed of light is c. On the surface of the sun (which has no orbital velocity in comparison to the earth), the speed of light is still c. From the frame of reference of the center of the galaxy (where the sun has extremely high relative velocity - which I'm too lazy to look up) the speed of light is still c.

    Which means that, either the speed of light somehow knows how fast you are going and adjusts itself (which is, of course, retarded) or there is something about spacetime that makes it seem that way. Hence the general theory of relativity was developed to explain it. (Which, in case you are curious, states that the ruler that you are using lenghtens or shortens depending on your "frame of reference")

    So, it's actually quite important.