it is still not a time machine, but it’s a start
hmmm, I wonder if shanna is out of a job? well, it is still not a time machine–but it is a start.
Scientists Mess With the Speed of Light
by Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Fri Aug 19, 4:00 PM ET
Researchers in Switzerland have succeeded in breaking the cosmic speed limit by getting light to go faster than, well, light.
Or is it all an illusion?
Scientists have recently succeeded in doing all sorts of fancy things with light, including slowing it down and even stopping it all together. Now a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland is controlling the speed of light using simple off-the-shelf optical fibers, without the aid of special media such as cold gases or crystalline solids like in other experiments.
"This has the enormous advantage of being a simple, inexpensive procedure that works at any wavelength," said Luc Thvenaz, lead author of the study detailing the research.
Using a technique called Stimulated Brillouin Scattering, the researchers were able to slow down or ratchet up the speed of light like the gas pedal on a car. They succeeded in reducing the speed of light by almost a factor of 4 (although that’s still plenty fast at 46,500 miles per second), but even more dramatically, the team was also able to speed up the speed of light. (Read more.)
