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Scientists Trap Light In Nano-Soup
An anonymous reader writes "Physicists at the Bhavnagar University in Gujarat, India have trapped light in a nano-soup concoction. The chance discovery could pave the way for lab-on-a-chip devices for processing optical information. As of now there is no theoretical explanation for why the fluid has the effects it does on laser light."
Except that according to TFA, the light hasn't actually "stopped". Instead it's been trapped in resonators, so in a crude picture it's bouncing back and forth within the fluid. The time effects observed relative to light should remain as they usually are, per relativity.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
In this case, the only way they're catching the light is effectively locking it up in a jar. If they open the jar to try and put more in, they lose the light they already captured.
Assuming they do find some way of adding more photons without losing what they've already got, the two options are:
1) The container fills up.
2) The container breaks.
Either way, nothing catastrophic would occur, unless they managed to contain a lot more energy. Just a flash of light. You can see from the photos in tfa, that the photons don't exhibit the same pattern that they did when the laser was firing (indicating some internal diffraction), so there wouldn't be a danger of having the equivalent of a more powerful laser shooting out in the same direction as the original beam. Then comes thermodynamics...It unlikely that they'd be able to contain energy in excess of the energy they're putting into containment (understatement), and entropy usually makes it so you have to spend a lot more energy, just to break even.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.