Harvard Physicists Make Light Dance

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.

Comments

relativity

[cpearson]

If you slow light down wouldnt that also effect the rate of time that the photon experience.

Vista Help Forum

Re:relativity

[TexVex]

If I understand correctly, light travels more slowly through translucent substances because the photons are being absorbed and re-emitted by the electrons in them. The photons travel at c until they hit an atom's electron shell. The electron absorbs the photon, quantum leaps to a higher energy state, then immediately releases the absorbed energy as another photon and returns to its rest state. That whole process takes time, effectively slowing down a pulse of light. The light is still travelling at c between atoms.

In the experiment being discussed in the article, it sounds like they are stopping the process at the point where the photons have been absorbed by matter, and delaying their being re-emitted for quite a long time (relatively speaking). The light is being stopped, but not by causing photons to travel more slowly than c. It's being stopped by keeping the photons' energy bottled up inside the Bose-Einstein condensate.

Credit to the Experimenter, Link to the article

[Dr J. keeps the nerd]

Though the Nature newsbrief doesn't mention her, the lead author and the main experimentalist was Naomi Ginsberg, a PhD student in Lene Hau's lab. You can read the article abstract on Nature's website: http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nature0549 3 The AFP wire item also gives credit where credit is due: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1028

Re:relativity as light is just surfing the expandi

[pclminion]

There, fixed it for ya. You were too smug to notice that you put your words into his mouth, and then accused him of making a flawed definition.

If you can define the term "expansion" without referring to temporality, I'll concede.

Re:relativity as light is just surfing the expandi

[22RealMcCoy]

The Ageless Photon

A photon does not age. No time passes for a photon. This is because although a photon travels with the velocity c, it stays at the exact same place in the fourth dimension as it surfs the expanding fourth dimension. How else, other than with a moving fourth dimension, can we explain that the only way to stay stationary in the fourth dimension is to move at the velocity of c relative to the three spatial dimensions? And how else, but with a moving fourth dimension, can we explain that any object stationary in the three spatial dimensions is moving with a velocity of c relative to the fourth dimension?

Time is an Emergent Phenomena of Moving Dimensions--It is Not a Dimension

Einstein's, Penrose's (and many leading physicist's) mistaken view of "the future being out there" in a block universe arises because physicists misleadingly label "time" the fourth dimension, thus implying that just as we can move anywhere in the three spatial dimensions, such as up and down and back again, so too can we move anywhere in the time dimension, to the past, the future, and back again, implying that both the past and future must exist, as sure as New York and Los Angeles.

But time is not so much the fourth dimension as it is an emergent phenomena that arises because a fourth dimension is expanding at the rate of c relative to the three spatial dimensions in a spherically symmetric manner in units of the Planck length.

Einstein was Right:

Einstein proclaimed that all objects travel through space-time at c. Even though we perceive a ruler along the x axis to be stationary, it is yet traveling through space-time at the fixed speed of c, implying that it is moving through time at the rate of c. Rotate it towards the y axis, and its projection upon the x axis shortens, yet it still appears to be stationary, and it is still traveling through space-time at the rate of c, meaning that it is still traveling at the rate of c through time, as it is stationary in space. Rotate it into the time dimension instead of into the y dimension, and its projection along the x axis still shortens (Lorentz contraction), but now it begins to move through the three spatial dimensions, while maintaining the fixed speed of c through space-time. Again, we see it propagate faster through the three spatial dimensions as it is rotated into the fourth "time" dimension (via a boost) because the fourth dimension is moving relative to the three spatial dimensions.

Simply put, it is not possible to rotate an object into the fourth "time" dimension without that object's velocity through the three stationary dimensions changing. Thus the time dimension itself must be expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions. Another way of looking at this is asking, "Why must something always gain a greater velocity through space when it is rotated into the fourth "time" dimension?" If someone can conduct a Lorentz transformation on a ruler, and rotate it into the fourth dimension without its velocity augmenting through the three spatial dimensions, I would very much like to hear about it.

Moving Dimensions Theory explains a lot of physics without growing government bureaucracies, and thus it is generally deemed as unworthy by tenured String Theorists and other government officials.

But MDT explains:

The Collapse of the Wave Function:

The collapse of the wave function is also known as an irreversible process, or a measurement, akin to a photon blackening a grain in photographic film, or a photon being measured in front of one slit or the other in a double-slit experiment, whereupon the interference pattern disappears because the slit is ascertained, the wave has collapsed, and the matter exhibits particulate behavior. Before it was measured, the photon expanded through space as a spherically-symmetric wave front, as it was matter surfing the expanding fourth dimension, which is expanding through space in a spherically-symmetric manner. Until the photon interacts with matter, or a measuremen