Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Speed of light slowed to 38 miles per hour

Light in a vacuum travels at about 186,000 miles per second. Now a group of scientists has slowed down a beam of light so that it only goes 38 miles per hour.

They did it by sending the light through super-cooled sodium atoms, which worked "like molasses" on the photons.

Read all about it here.

38 miles per hour? That's about half as fast as I usually drive :-P

at February 23, 2010

3 comments:

  1. Walkinginlove11:52 AM, February 23, 2010

    So much for light being a constant!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lee Shelton10:55 PM, February 23, 2010

    So, did the light actually slow down, or did time speed up?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chris Knight10:58 PM, February 23, 2010

    Time's going by too fast anyway. We don't need science "helping" it along :-P

    ReplyDelete