Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Create New "Lightsaber-Like" Form of Matter
First time accepted submitter loftarasa writes "A group of scientists led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have developed a form of matter by binding massless photons together in a special kind of medium to create 'photonic molecules', effectively bringing us a bit closer to a world with lightsabers. 'The discovery, Lukin said, runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as massless particles which don't interact with each other – shine two laser beams at each other, he said, and they simply pass through one another. "Photonic molecules," however, behave less like traditional lasers and more like something you might find in science fiction – the light saber.' The work is described in Nature (paywalled)."
no, photons have 0 rest mass. Their energy is not mv^2 kinetic energy. You can tell because photons have 0 rest mass, all move at the same speed, and have different amounts of energy depending on how much energy they have.
Gravity does not "bend light". Light always, always, always goes along lightlike paths. Gravity bends spacetime.
A "black hole" is a region of space in which there is no lightlike geodesic that leaves the black hole (and continues to positive lightlike infinity).
In conclusion, shut up if you don't know what you're talking about, you colossal faggot.
You're a very classical kind of idiot. If you regularly encountered black holes, or were the size of a quark, or traveled at relativistic speeds, you would not think anything unusual about the physics of these things. If this stuff were simple we wouldn't need the smartest guys on the planet working it out, we could just call you up.
Sorry Captain Hubris but the pencil necks win this one.