<quote>Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.
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I wouldn't have been surprised if a newspaper journalist used dramatization that indicated as if Einstein is proven wrong. I didn't expect that kind of dramatization when reporting scientific matters on news.harvard.
Of course, Einstein is still right. All these experiments slow down the speed of light when it's traveling in special matter at special temperatures. Constant speed of light in free space is a necessary condition for Theory of Relativity be correct. If that condition is found to be incorrect, our current understanding of the universe completely goes for a toss;
Indeed. To be even more specific, the reason why it is slowed down is because of absorption and re-emittance of particles of light (photons). If you go down the the extremely small scale, what you will actually see is a photon moving at the speed of light, colliding with an atom, being absorbed by an electron, then re-emitted on the other side. Repeat this process ad nauseam and the constant absorption/re-emittance will slow down the speed of light to a varying degree. Most importantly, however, is that the c is constant in free space.
I wouldn't have been surprised if a newspaper journalist used dramatization that indicated as if Einstein is proven wrong. I didn't expect that kind of dramatization when reporting scientific matters on news.harvard.
Of course, Einstein is still right. All these experiments slow down the speed of light when it's traveling in special matter at special temperatures. Constant speed of light in free space is a necessary condition for Theory of Relativity be correct. If that condition is found to be incorrect, our current understanding of the universe completely goes for a toss;