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Harvard Physicist Totally Pwns Einstein

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (the special or the general, or both, I can never remember) states, among other things, that the speed of light is constant and that nothing can exceed that speed.

Harvard physics professor Lene Hau suspects old Alby was using some kind of showboating Globetrotter algebra (all razzamatazz).

"Two years ago we slowed it down to 38 miles an hour; now we've been able to park it then bring it back up to full speed."  Lene Hau isn't talking about a used motorbike, but about light – that ethereal, life-sustaining stuff that normally travels 93 million miles from the sun in about eight minutes.

Hau, 41, a professor of physics at Harvard, admits that the famous genius would "probably be stunned" at the results of her experiments. Working at the Rowland Institute for Science, overlooking the Charles River and the gold dome of the state Capitol in Boston, she and her colleagues slowed light 20 million-fold in 1999, to an incredible 38 miles an hour. They did it by passing a beam of light through a small cloud of atoms cooled to temperatures a billion times colder than those in the spaces between stars. The atom cloud was suspended magnetically in a chamber pumped down to a vacuum 100 trillion times lower than the pressure of air in the room where you are reading this.

"It's nifty to look into the chamber and see a clump of ultracold atoms floating there," Hau says. "In this odd state, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it."

She and her team continued to tweak their system until they finally brought light to a complete stop.

In addition to fooling your friends and sticking it to Einstein, the parlor trick holds the promise for some useful applications as well, like quantum computing, unhackable communications, and possibly a thin premise for a Real Genius sequel.

"Wouldn't that be nifty!" Hau says.

(HT: Not So Fast)

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Harvard Physicist Totally Pwns Einstein

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (the special or the general, or both, I can never remember) states, among other things, that the speed of light is constant and that nothing can exceed that speed.

Harvard physics professor Lene Hau suspects old Alby was using some kind of showboating Globetrotter algebra (all razzamatazz).

"Two years ago we slowed it down to 38 miles an hour; now we've been able to park it then bring it back up to full speed."  Lene Hau isn't talking about a used motorbike, but about light – that ethereal, life-sustaining stuff that normally travels 93 million miles from the sun in about eight minutes.

Hau, 41, a professor of physics at Harvard, admits that the famous genius would "probably be stunned" at the results of her experiments. Working at the Rowland Institute for Science, overlooking the Charles River and the gold dome of the state Capitol in Boston, she and her colleagues slowed light 20 million-fold in 1999, to an incredible 38 miles an hour. They did it by passing a beam of light through a small cloud of atoms cooled to temperatures a billion times colder than those in the spaces between stars. The atom cloud was suspended magnetically in a chamber pumped down to a vacuum 100 trillion times lower than the pressure of air in the room where you are reading this.

"It's nifty to look into the chamber and see a clump of ultracold atoms floating there," Hau says. "In this odd state, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it."

She and her team continued to tweak their system until they finally brought light to a complete stop.

In addition to fooling your friends and sticking it to Einstein, the parlor trick holds the promise for some useful applications as well, like quantum computing, unhackable communications, and possibly a thin premise for a Real Genius sequel.

"Wouldn't that be nifty!" Hau says.

(HT: Not So Fast)