6 months ago
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Posted On: May 5th 2026, 05:32 pm
Light slowed to 17 m/s.
Slow enough for a bicycle to outrun. Then she stopped it entirely — held it inside cold atoms for one millisecond, then released it back as a photon on the other side.
The universal constant has more wiggle room than the textbooks let on.
Lene Hau, Harvard. Nature 1999 and 2001.
#science #physics #quantumphysics #lightspeed
Slow enough for a bicycle to outrun. Then she stopped it entirely — held it inside cold atoms for one millisecond, then released it back as a photon on the other side.
The universal constant has more wiggle room than the textbooks let on.
Lene Hau, Harvard. Nature 1999 and 2001.
#science #physics #quantumphysics #lightspeed
Comments (87)
4 months agowayside22
Keep in mind that c is “the speed of light in a vacuum.” Light travels at a rate slower than c when traveling through media other than a perfect vacuum
5 months agokarlroebuck3112
As a lay person, if it has become part- matter then is it no longer light and thus isn't behaving as light would at that point??
5 months agoanonymoususausa
All mediums with a refractive index >1 (call it R) slow down light by 1/R. She found a medium with very high R. But photons are not actually slowing down, as massless particles they MUST propagate at c. It’s the wave that slows down due to scattering and interference. So this description is simplified to sounding like magic when it’s not.
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